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EARLY BRITAIN 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN 



BY THE LATE 

GRANT ALLEN, B.A. 



WITH MAP 



PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE GENERAL 
LITERATURE COMMITTEE 



LONDON : 
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 

northumberland avenue, w.c. ; 43, queen victoria street, e.c. 

Brighton : 129, North Street. 

New York : E. S. GORHAM. 

1910 



^)Ai5^ 



'Date of last impris^^ 1904] 






PREFACE. 



This little book is an attempt to give a brief sketch 
of Britain under the early English conquerors, rather 
from the social than from the political point of view. 
For that purpose not much has been said about the 
doings of kings and statesmen ; but attention has 
been mainly directed towards the less obvious evi- 
dence afforded us by existing monuments as to the 
life and mode of thought of the people themselves. 
The principal object throughout has been to estimate 
the importance of those elements in modern British 
life which are chiefly due to purely English or Low- 
Dutch influences. 

The original authorities most largely consulted 
have been, first and above all, the " English Chro- 
nicle," and to an almost equal extent, Bseda's 
"Ecclesiastical History." These have been supple- 
mented, where necessary, by Florence of Worcester 
and the other Latin writers of later date. I have 
not thought it needful, however, to repeat any of the 
gossiping stories from William of Malmesbury, Henry 
of Huntingdon, and their compeers, which make 
up the bulk of our early history as told in most 
modern books. Still less have I paid any attention 
to the romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Gildas, 



VI PREFACE. 

Nennius, and the other Welsh tracts have been 
sparingly employed, and always with a reference by 
name. Asser has been used with caution, where his 
information seems to be really contemporary. I 
have also derived some occasional hints from the old 
British bards, from Beowulf^ from the laws, and from 
J;he charters in the " Codex Diplomaticus." These 
written documents have been helped out by some 
personal study of the actual early English relics 
preserved in various museums, and by the indirect 
evidence of local nomenclature. 

Among modern books, I owe my acknowledg- 
ments in the first and highest degree to Dr. E. A. 
Freeman; from whose great and just authority, how- 
ever, 1 have occasionally ventured to differ in some 
minor matters. Next, my acknowledgments are due 
to Canon Stubbs, to Mr. Kemble, and to Mr. J. R. 
Green. Dr. Guest's valuable papers in the Trans- 
actions of the Archaeological Institute have supplied 
many useful suggestions. To Lappenberg and Sir 
Francis Palgrave I am also indebted for various 
details. Professor Rolleston's contributions to 
" Archseologia," as well as his Appendix to Canon 
Greenweirs " British Barrows," have been consulted 
for anthropological and antiquarian points ; on which 
also Professor Huxley and Mr. Akerman have pub- 
lished useful papers. Professor Boyd Dawkins's 
work on "Early Man in Britain," as well as the 
writings of Worsaae and Steenstrup have helped in 
elucidating the condition of the English at the date 
of the Conquest. Nor must 1 forget the aid derived 



PREFACE. Vll 

from Mr. Isaac Taylor's " Words and Places," from 
Professor Henry Morley's " English Literature," and 
from Messrs. Haddan and Stubbs' "Councils." To 
Mr. Gomme, Mr. E. B. Tylor, Mr. Sweet, Mr. 
James Collier, Dr. H. Leo, and perhaps others, I am 
under various obligations ; and if any acknowledg- 
ments have been overlooked, I trust the injured per- 
son will forgive me when I have had already to quote 
so many authorities for so small a book. The popu- 
lar character of the work renders it undesirable to 
load the pages with footnotes of reference ; and 
scholars will generally see for themselves the source 
of the information given in the text. 

Personally, my thanks are due to my friend, Mr. 
York Powell, for much valuable aid and assistance, 
and to the Rev. E. McClure, one of the Society's 
secretaries, for his kind revision of the volume in 
proof, and for several suggestions of which I have 
gladly availed myself. 

As various early English names and phrases occur 
throughout the book, it will be best, perhaps, to say 
a few words about their pronunciation here, rather 
than to leave over that subject to the chapter on the 
Anglo-Saxon language, near the close of the work. 
A few notes on this matter are therefore appended 
elow. 

The simple vowels, as a rule, have their continental 
pronunciation, approximately thus : J as in father, a 
as in ask ; e as in there^ e as in men ; I as in marine, 
/"as mfit ; J as in note, o as in not ; u as in brute, u 
as in fifU ; y as in griin (German),;^ as in hiibsch 



VIU PREFACE. 

(German). The quantity of the vowels is not 
marked in this work. M is not a diphthong, but a 
simple vowel sound, the same as our own short a in 
man^ that^ &c. Ea is pronounced like ya. C is 
always hard, like k ; and g is also always hard, as in 
begin : they must never be pronounced like s or / 
The other consonants have the same values as in 
modern English. No vowel or consonant is ever 
mute. Hence we get the following approximate 
pronunciations : Alfred and ^thelred, as if written 
Alfred and Athelred ; ^thelstan and Dunstan, as 
Athelstahn and Doonstahn ; Eadwine and Oswine, 
nearly as Yahd-weena and Ose-weena ; Wulfsige and 
Sigeberht, as Wolf-seeg-a and Seeg-a-bayrt ; Ceolred 
and Cynewulf, as Keole-red and Kiine-wolf. These 
approximations look a little absurd when 'written 
down in the only modern phonetic equivalents; but 
that is the fault of our own existing spelling, not of 
the early English names themselves. 

G. A, 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 

At a period earlier than the dawn of written history 
there lived somewhere among the great table-lands 
and plains of Central Asia a race known to us only 
by the uncertain name of Aryans. These Aryans were 
a fair-skinned and well-built people, long past the 
stage of aboriginal savagery, and possessed of a con- 
siderable degree of primitive culture. Though mainly 
pastoral in habit, they were acquainted with tillage, 
and they grew for themselves at least one kind of 
cereal grain. They spoke a language whose existence 
and nature we infer from the remnants of it which 
survive in the tongues of their descendants, and from 
these remnants we are able to judge, in some measure, 
of their civilisation and their modes of thought. The 
indications thus preserved for us show the Aryans to 
have been a simple and fierce comm.unity of early 
warriors, farmers, and shepherds, still in a partially- 
nomad condition, living under a patriarchal rule, origin- 
ally ignorant of all metals save gold, but possessing 

B 



2 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN, 

weapons and implements of stone/ and worshipping as 
their chief god the open heaven. We must not regard 
them as an idyllic and peaceable people : on the con- 
trary, they were the fiercest and most conquering tribe 
ever known. In mental power and in plasticity of 
manners, however, they probably rose far su'perior to 
any race then living, except only the Semitic nations 
of the Mediterranean coast. 

From the common Central Asian home, colonies 
of warlike Aryans gradually dispersed themselves, still 
in the pre-historic period, under pressure of population 
or hostile invasion, over many districts of Europe and 
Asia. Some of them moved southward, across the 
passes of Afghanistan, and occupied the fertile plains 
of the Indus and the Ganges, where they became the 
ancestors of the Brahmans and other modern high- 
caste Hindoos. The language which they took with 
them to their new settlements beyond the Himalayas 
was the Sanskrit, which still remains to this day the 
nearest of all dialects that we now possess to the 
primitive Aryan speech. From it are derived the chief 
modern tongues of northern India, from the Vindhyas 
to the Hindu Kush. Other Aryan , tribes settled in 
the mountain districts west of Hindustan ; and yet 
others found themselves a home in the hills of Iran 
or Persia, where they still preserve an allied dialect 
of the ancient mother tongue. 

^ Professor Boyd Dawkins has shown that the Continental 
Celts were still in their stone age when they invaded Europe ; 
whence we must conclude that the original Aryans were 
unacquainted with the use of bronze. 



THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 3 

But the mass of the emigrants from the Central 
Asian fatherland moved further westward in successive 
waves, and occupied, one after another, the midland 
plains and mountainous peninsulas of Europe. First 
of all, apparently, came the Celts, who spread 
slowly across the South of Russia and Germany, and 
who are found at the dawn of authentic history ex- 
tending over the entire western coasts and islands of the 
continent, from Spain to Scotland. Mingled in many 
places with the still earlier non-Aryan aborigines — 
perhaps Iberians and Euskarians, a short and swarthy 
race, armed only with weapons of polished stone, and 
represented at the present day by the Basques of the 
Pyrenees and the Asturias — the Celts held rule in 
Spain, Gaul, and Britain, up to the date of the several 
Roman conquests. A second great wave of Aryan 
immigration, that of the Hellenic and Italian races, 
broke over the shores of the ^gean and the Adriatic, 
where their cognate languages have become familiar 
to us in the two extreme and typical forms of the 
classical Greek and Latin. A third wave was that of 
the Teutonic or German people, who followed and 
drove out the Celts over a large part of central and 
western Europe ; while a fourth and final swarm was 
that of the Slavonic tribes, which still inhabit only the 
extreme eastern portion of the continent. 

With the Slavonians we shall have nothing to do in 
this enquiry ; and with the Greek and ItaHan races 
we need only deal very incidentally. But the Celts, 
whom the English invaders found in possession of all 
Britain when they began their settlements in the 

B 2 



4 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

island, form the subject of another vokime in this 
series, and will necessarily call for some small portion 
of our attention here also ; while it is to the Germanic 
race that the English stock itself actually belongs, so 
that we must examine somewhat more closely the 
course of Germanic immigration through Europe, and 
the nature of the primitive Teutonic civilisation. 

The Germanic family of peoples consisted of a race 
which early split up into two great hordes or stocks, 
speaking dialects which differed slightly from one 
another through the action of the various circum- 
stances to which they were each exposed These two 
stocks are the High German and the Low German 
(with which last may be included the Gothic and the 
Scandinavian). Moving across Europe from east to 
west, they slowly drove out the Celts from Germany 
and the central plains, and took possession of the 
whole district between the Alps, the Rhine, and the 
Baltic, which formed their limits at the period when 
they first came into contact with the Roman poAver. 
The Goths, living in closest proximity to the empire, 
fell upon it during the decline and decay of Rome, 
settled in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and becoming 
absorbed in the mass of the native population, dis- 
appear altogether from history as a distinguishable 
nationality. But the High and Low Germans retain 
to the present day their distinctive language and 
features ; and the latter branch, to which the English 
people belong, still lives for the most part in the same 
lands which it has held ever since the date of the 
early Germanic immigration. 



THE OIRGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 5 

The Low Germans, in the third century after 
Christ, occupied in the main the belt of flat country 
between the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine. 
Between them and the old High German Swabians lay 
a race intermediate in tongue and blood, the Franks. 
The Low Germans were divided, like most other bar- 
baric races, into several fluctuating and ill-marked 
tribes, whose names are loosely and perhaps inter- 
changeably used by the few authorities which remain 
to us. We must not expect to find among them the 
definiteness of modern civilised nations, but rather 
such a vagueness as that which characterised the 
loose confederacies of North American Indians or 
the various shifting peoples of South Africa. But 
there are three of their tribes which stand fairly well 
marked off from one another in early history, and 
which bore, at least the chief share in the colonisa- 
tion of Britain. These three tribes are the Jutes, 
the English, and the Saxons. Closely connected with 
them, but less strictly bound in the same family tie, 
were the Frisians. 

The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions, 
lived in the marshy forests and along the winding 
fiords of Jutland, the extreme peninsula of Denmark, 
which still preserves their name in our own day. 
.The English dwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad 
neck of the peninsula, which we now call Sleswick. 
And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied the 
flat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder to 
that of the Rhine. At the period when history lifts 
the curtain upon the future Gennanic colonists of 



6 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants of 
the low-lying lands around the Baltic and the North 
Sea, and closely connected with other tribes on either 
side, such as the Frisians and the Danes, who still 
speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavian 
languages. 

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the 
relationship between the first Teutonic settlers in 
Britain and their continental brethren. Not only are 
the true Englishmen of modern England distantly 
connected with the Franks, who never to our know- 
ledge took part in the colonisation of the island at all ; 
and more closely connected with the Frisians, some 
of whom probably accompanied the earliest piratical 
hordes ; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a 
later date in all the northern counties : but they are 
also most closely connected of all with those members 
of the colonising tribes who did not themselves bear 
a share in the settlement, and whose descendants 
are still living in Denmark and in various parts of 
Germany. The English proper, it is true, seem to 
have deserted their old home in Sleswick in a body ; 
so that, according to Bseda, the Christian historian 
Df Northumberland, in his time this oldest England 
by the shores of the Baltic lay waste and unpeopled, 
through the completeness of the exodus. But the 
Jutes appear to have migrated in small numbers, 
while the larger part of the tribe remained at home 
in their native marshland ; and of the more numerous 
Saxons, though a great swarm went out to conquer 
southern Britain, a vast body was still left behind 



THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 7 

in Germany, where it continued independent and 
pagan till the time of Karl the Great, long after 
the Teutonic colonists of Britain had grown into 
peaceable and civilised Christians. It is from the 
statements of later historians with regard to these 
continental Saxons that our knowledge of the early 
English customs and institutions, during the con- 
tinental period of English history, must be mainly 
inferred. We gather our picture of the English and 
Saxons who first came to this country from the picture 
drawn for us of those among their brethren whom 
they left behind in the primitive English home. 

These three tribes, the Jutes, the English, and the 
Saxons, had not yet, apparently, advanced far enough 
in the idea of national unity to possess a separate 
general name, distinguishing them altogether from the 
other tribes of the Germanic stock. Most probably 
they did not regard themselves at this period as a 
single nation at all, or even as more closely bound to 
one another than to the surrounding and kindred 
tribes. They may have united at times for purposes 
of a special war ; but their union was merely analo- 
gous to that of two North American peoples, or two 
modern European nations, pursuing a common policy 
for awhile. At a later date, in Britain, the three 
tribes learned to call themselves collectively by the 
name of that one among them which earliest rose to 
supremacy — the English ; and the whole southern 
half of the island came to be known by their name 
as England. Even from the first it seems probable 
that their language was spoken ot as English only, 



8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

"and comparatively little as Saxon. But since it would 
be inconvenient to use the name of one dominant 
tribe alone, the English, as equivalent to those of the 
three, and since it is desirable to have a common 
title for all the Germanic colonists of Britain, when- 
ever it is necessary to speak of them together, we 
shall employ the late and, strictly speaking, incorrect 
form of " Anglo-Saxons " for this purpose. Similarly, 
in order to distinguish the earliest pure form of the 
English language from its later modern form, now 
largely enriched and altered by the addition of 
Romance or Latin words and the disuse of native 
ones, we shall always speak of it, where distinction is 
necessary, as Anglo-Saxon. The term is now too 
deeply rooted in our language to be again uprooted ; 
and it has, besides, the merit of supplying a want. 
At the same time, it should be remembered that the 
expression Anglo-Saxon is purely artificial, and was 
never used by the people themselves in describing 
:heir fellows or their tongue. When they did not 
speak of themselves as Jutes, English, and Saxons 
respectively, they spoke of themselves as English 
alone. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. 

From the notices left us by Baeda in Britain, and by 
Nithard and others on the continent, of the habits 
and manners which distinguished those Saxons who 
remained in the old fatherland, we are able to form 
some idea of the primitive condition of those other 
Saxons, English, and Jutes, who afterwards colonised 
Britain, during the period while they still all lived 
together in the heather-clad wastes and marshy low- 
lands of Denmark and Northern Germany. The early 
heathen poem oi Beowulf 2\^o gives us a glimpse of 
their ideas and their mode of thought. The known 
physical characteristics of the race, the nature of the 
country which they inhabited, the analogy of other 
Germanic tribes, and the recent discoveries of pre- 
liistoric archaeology, all help us to piece out a fairly 
consistent picture of their appearance, their manner of 
life, and their rude political institutions. 

We must begin by dismissing from our minds all 
those modern notions which are almost inevitably 
implied by the use of language directly derived from 
that of our heathen ancestors, but now mixed up in 
our conceptions with the most advanced forms of 
European civilisation. We must not allow such words 



ro ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

as " king " and " English " to mislead us into a species 
of filial blindness to the real nature of our Teutonic 
forefathers. The little community of wild farmers 
and warriors who lived among the dim woodlands of 
Sleswick, beside the swampy margin of the North Sea, 
has grown into the nucleus of a vast empire, only very 
partially Germanic in blood, and enriched by all the 
alien culture of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome. 
But as it still preserves the identical tongue of its 
early barbarous days, we are naturally tempted to read 
our modern acquired feelings into the simple but 
familiar terms employed by our continental prede- 
cessors. What the early English called a king we 
should now-a-days call a chief; what they called a 
meeting of wise men we should now-a-days call a 
palaver. In fact, we- must recollect that we are deal- 
ing with a purely barbaric race — not savage, indeed, 
nor without a certain rude culture of its own, the 
result of long centuries of previous development ; yet 
essentially military and predatory in its habits, and 
akin in its material civilisation to many races which 
we now regard as immeasurably our inferiors. If we 
wish for a modern equivalent of the primitive Anglo- 
Saxon level of culture, we may perhaps best find it in 
the Kurds of the Turkish and Persian frontier, or in 
the Mahrattas of the wild mountain region of the 
western Deccan. 

The early English in Sleswick and Friesland had 
partially reached the agricultural stage of civilisation. 
They tilled little plots of ground in the forest ; but 
they depended more largely for subsistence upon their 



THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. 1 I 

cattle, and they were also hunters and trappers in the 
great belts of woodland or marsh which everywhere 
surrounded their isolated villages. They were 
acquainted with the use of bronze from the first period 
of their settlement in Europe, and some of the battle- 
axes or shields which they manufactured from this 
metal were beautifully chased with exquisite decora- 
tive patterns, equalling in taste the ornamental designs 
still employed by the Polynesian islanders. Such 
weapons, however, were doubtless intended for the 
use of the chieftains only, and were probably employed 
as insignia of rank alone. They are still discovered 
in the barrows which cover the remains of the early 
chieftains ; though it is possible that they may really 
belong to the monuments of a yet earUer race. But 
iron was certainly employed by the English, at least, 
from about the first century of the Christian era, and 
its use was perhaps introduced into the marshlands 
of Sleswick by the Germanic conquerors of the north. 
Even at this early date, abundant proof exists of 
mercantile intercourse with the Roman world (pro- 
bably through Pannonia), whereby the alien culture of 
the south was already engrafted in part upon the low 
civilisation of the native English. Amber was then 
exported from the Baltic, while gold, silver, and glass 
beads were given in return. Roman coins are dis- 
covered in Low German tombs of the first five 
centuries in Sleswick, Holstein, Friesland, and the 
Isles ; and Roman patterns are imitated in the iron 
weapons and utensils of the same period. Gold 
byzants of the fifth century prove an intercourse with 



12 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Constantinople at the exact date of the colonisation 
of Britain. From the very earliest moment when we 
catch a glimpse of its nature, the home-grown English 
culture had already begun to be modified by the 
superior arts of Rome. Even the alphabet was known 
and used in its Runic form, though the absence of 
writing materials caused its employment to be 
restricted to inscriptions on wooden tablets, on rude 
stone monuments, or on utensils of metal-work. A 
golden drinking-horn found in Sleswick, and engraved 
with the maker's name, referred to the middle of the 
fourth century, contains the earliest known specimen 
of the English language. 

The early English society was founded entirely on 
the tie of blood. Every clan or family lived by itself 
and formed a guild for mutual protection, each kins- 
man being his brother's keeper, and bound to avenge 
his death by feud with the tribe or clan which had 
killed him. This duty of blood-revenge was the 
supreme religion of the race. Moreover, the clan was 
answerable as a whole for the ill-deeds of all its 
members ; and the fine payable for murder or injury 
was handed over by the family of the wrong-doer to 
the family of the injured man. 

Each little village of the old English community 
possessed a general independence of its own, 
and lay apart from all the others, often surrounded by 
a broad belt or mark of virgin forest. It consisted of 
a clearing like those of the American backwoods, 
where a single family or kindred had made its home, 
and preserved its separate independence intact. Each 



THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. 1 3 

of these families was known by the name of its real or 
supposed ancestor, the patronymic being formed by 
the addition of the syllable ifig. Thus the descend- 
ants of ^lla would be called ^Ellings, and their ham or 
stockade would be known as^llingaham,or in modern 
form Allingham. So the tun or enclosure of the 
Culmings would be Culmingatun, similarly modernised 
into Culmington. Names of this type abound in the 
newer England at the present day ; as in the case of 
Birmingham, Buckingham, Wellington, Kensington, 
Basingstoke, and Paddington. But while in America 
the clearing is merely a temporary phase, and the 
border of forest is soon cut down so as to connect the 
village with its neighbours, in the old Anglo-Saxon 
fatherland the border of woodland, heath, or fen was 
jealously guarded as a frontier and natural defence 
for the little predatory and agricultural community. 
Whoever crossed it was bound to give notice of his 
coming by blowing a horn ; else he was cut down at 
once as a stealthy enemy. The marksmen wished to 
remain separate from all others, and only to mix with 
those of their own kin. In this primitive love of 
separation we have the germ of that local independ- 
ence and that isolated private home life which is 
one of the most marked characteristics of modern 
Englishmen. 

In the middle of the clearing, surrounded by a 
wooden stockade, stood the village, a group of rude de- 
tached huts. The marksmen each possessed a separate 
little homestead, consisting usually of a small wooden 
house or shanty, a courtyard, and a cattle-fold. So 



14 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

far, private property in land had already begun. But 
the forest and the pasture land were not appropriated : 
each man had a right from year to year to let loose 
his kine or horses on a certain equal or proportionate 
space of land assigned to him by the village in council. 
The wealth of the people consisted mainly in cattle 
which fed on the pasture, and pigs turned out to fatten 
on the acorns of the forest : but a small portion of the 
soil was ploughed and sown ; and this portion also 
was distributed to the villagers for tillage by annual 
arrangement. The hall of the chief rose in the midst 
of the lesser houses, open to all comers. The village 
moot, or assembly of freemen, met in the open air, 
under some sacred tree, or beside some old monu- 
mental stone, often a relic of the older aboriginal race, 
marking the tomb of a dead chieftain, but worshipped 
as a god by the English immigrants. At these 
informal meetings, every head of a family had a right 
to appear and deliberate. The primitive English 
constitution was a pure republican aristocracy or 
oligarchy of householders, like that which still survives 
in the Swiss forest cantons. 

But there were yet distinctions of rank in the 
villages and in the loose tribes formed by their union 
for purposes of war or otherwise. The people were 
divided into three classes of mthelings or chieftains, 
freolings or freemen, and theows or slaves. The 
cethelings were the nobles and rulers of each tribe. 
There was no king : but when the tribes joined 
together in a war, their cethelings cast lots together, 
and whoever drew the winning lot was made com- 



THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. 1 5 

mander for the time being. As soon as the war was 
over, each tribe returned to its own independence. 
Indeed, the only really coherent body was the village 
or kindred : and the whole course of early English 
history consists of a long and tedious effort at 
increased national unity, which was never fully realised 
till the Norman conquerors bound the whole nation 
together in the firm grasp of William, Henry, and 
Edward. 

In personal appearance, the primitive Anglo-Saxons 
were typical Germans of very unmixed blood. Tall, 
fair-haired, and gray-eyed, their limbs were large and 
stout, and tlieir heads of the round or brachycephalic 
type, common to most Aryan races. They did not 
intermarry with other nations, preserving their Ger- 
manic blood pure and unadulterated. But as they 
ha'd slaves, and as these slaves must in many cases 
have been captives spared in war, we must suppose 
that such descriptions apply, strictly speaking, to the 
freemen and chieftains alone. The slaves might be 
of any race, and in process of time they must have 
learnt to speak English, and their children must have 
become English in all but blood. Many of them, 
indeed, would probably be actually English on the 
father's side, though born of slave mothers. Hence 
we must be careful not to interpret the expressions of 
historians, who would be thinking of the free classes 
only, and especially of the nobles, as though they 
applied to the slaves as well. Wherever slavery 
exists, the blood of the slave community is necessarily 
very mixed The picture which the heathen English 



1 6 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

have drawn of themselves in Beowulf is one of savage 
pirates, clad in shirts of ring-armour, and greedy of 
gold and ale. Fighting and drinking are their two 
delights. The noblest leader is he who builds a great 
hall, throws it open for his people to carouse in, and 
liberally deals out beer, and bracelets, and money at 
the feast. The joy of battle is keen in their breasts. 
The sea and the storm are welcome to them. They 
are fearless and greedy pirates, not ashamed of living 
by the strong hand alone. 

In creed, the English were pagans, having a religion 
of beliefs rather than of rites. Their chief deity, perhaps, 
was a form of the old Aryan Sky-god, who took with 
them the guise of Thunor or Thunder (in Scandina- 
vian, Thor), an angry warrior hurling his hammer, the 
thunder-bolt, from the stormy clouds. These thunder- 
bolts were often found buried in the earth ; and being 
really the polished stone-axes of the earlier inhabit- 
ants, they do actually resemble a hammer in shape. 
But Woden, the special god of the Teutonic race, had 
practically usurped the highest place in their mytho- 
logy : he is represented as the leader of the Germans 
in their exodus from Asia to north-western Europe, 
and since all the pedigrees of their chieftains were 
traced back to Woden, it is not improbable that he 
may have been really a deified ancestor of the prin- 
cipal Germanic families. The popular creed, however, 
was mainly one of lesser gods, such as elves, ogres, 
giants, and monsters, inhabitants of the mark and fen, 
stories of whom still survive in English villages as 
folk-lore or fairy tales. A few legends of the pagan 



THE ENGLISH HY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. 17 

time are preserved for us in Christian books. BeowiilJ 
is rich in allusions to these ancient superstitions. If 
we may build upon the slender materials which alone 
are available, it would seem that the dead chieftains 
were buried in barrows, and ghost-worship was 
practised at their tombs. The temples were niere 
stockades of wood, with rude blocks or monoliths 
to represent deities and altars. Probably their few 
rites consisted merely of human or other sacrifices 
to the gods or the ghosts of departed chiefs. 
There was a regular priesthood of the great gods, 
but each man was priest for his own household. As 
in most other heathen communities, the real worship 
of the people was mainly directed to the special 
family deities of every hearth. The great gods were 
appealed to by the chieftains and by the race in battle : 
but the household gods or deified ancestors received 
the chief homage of the churls by their own firesides. 
Thus the Anglo-Saxons, before the great exodus 
from Denmark and North Germany, appear as a race 
of fierce, cruel, and barbaric pagans, delighting in the 
sea, in slaughter, and in drink. They dwelt in little 
isolated communities, bound together internally by 
ties of blood, and uniting occasionally with others 
only for purposes of rapine. They lived a life which 
mainly alternated between grazing, piratical sea-faring, 
and cattle-lifting ; always on the war-trail against the 
possessions of others, when they were not specially 
engaged in taking care of their own. Every record 
and every indication shows them to us as fiercer 
heathen prototypes of the Scotch clans in the most 
c 



1 8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

lawless days of the Highlands. Incapable of union 
for any peaceful purpose at home, they learned their 
earliest lesson of subordination in their piratical attacks 
upon the civilised Christian community of Roman 
Britain. We first meet with them in history in the 
character of destroyers and sea-robbers. Yet they 
possessed already in their wild marshy home the 
germs of those free institutions which have made the 
history of England unique amongst the nations oi 
Europe. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ENGLISH SETTLE IN BRITAIN. 

Proximity to the sea turns robbers into corsairs. 
^Vhen predatory tribes reach the seaboard they always 
take to piracy, provided they have attained the ship- 
building level of culture. In the ancient ^gean, in 
the Malay Archipelago, in the China seas, we see the 
same process always taking place. Probably from 
the first period of their severance from the main 
Aryan stock in Central Asia, the Low German race 
and their ancestors had been a predatory and con- 
quering people, for ever engaged in raids and smoul- 
dering warfare with their neighbours. When they 
reached the Baltic and the islands of the Frisian 
coast, they grew naturally into a nation of pirates. 
Even during the bronze age, we find sculptured stones 
with representations of long row-boats, manned by 
several oarsmen, and in one or two cases actually 
bearing a rude sail. Their prows and sterns stand 
high out of the water, and are adorned with intricate 
carvings. They seem like the predecessors of the 
long ships — snakes and sea-dragons — which afterwards 
bore the northern corsairs into every river of Europe. 
Such boats, adapted for long sea-voyages, show 
a considerable intercourse, piratical or commercial 

C 2 



20 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

between the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian North and 
other distant countries. Certainly, from the earliest 
days of Roman rule on the German Ocean to the 
thirteenth century, the Low Dutch and Scandinavian 
tribes carried on an almost unbroken course of expe- 
ditions by sea, beginning in every case with mere 
descents upon the coast for the purposes of plunder 
but ending, as a rule, with regular colonisation or 
political supremacy. In this manner the people of 
the Baltic and the North Sea ravaged or settled in 
every country on the sea-shore, from Orkney, Shetland, 
and the Faroes, to Normandy, Apulia, and Greece ; 
from Boulogne and Kent, to Iceland, Greenland, and, 
perhaps, America. The colonisation of South-Eastern 
Britain was but the first chapter in this long history 
of predatory excursions on the part of the Low 
German peoples. 

The piratical ships of the early English were row- 
boats of very simple construction. We actually 
possess one undoubted specimen at the present 
day, whose very date is fixed for us by the circum- 
stances of its discovery. It was dug up, some years 
since, from a peat-bog in Sleswick, the old England 
of our forefathers, along with iron arms and imple- 
ments, and in association with Roman coins ranging 
in date from a.d. 67 to a.d. 217. It may therefore 
be pretty confidently assigned to the first half of 
the third century. In this interesting relic, then, we 
have one of the identical boats in which the descents 
upon the British coast were first made. The craft is 
rudely built of oaken boards, and is seventy feet long 



THE ENGLISH SETTLE IN BRITAIN. 2 1 

by nine broad. The stem and stern are alike in 
shape, and the boat is fitted for being beached upon 
the foreshore. A sculptured stone at Haggeby, in 
Uplande, roughly represents for us such a ship under 
way, probably of about the same date. It is rowed 
with twelve pairs of oars, and has no sails; and it 
contains no other persons but the rowers and a cox- 
swain, who acted doubtless as leader of the expedition. 
Such a boat might convey about 120 fighting men. 

There are some grounds for believing that, even 
before the establishment of the Roman power in 
Britain, Teutonic pirates from the northern marsh- 
lands were already in the habit of plundering the 
Celtic inhabitants of the country between the Wash 
and the mouth of the Thames ; and it is possible 
that an English colony may, even then, have estab- 
lished itself in the modern Lincolnshire. But, be 
this as it may, we know at least that during the 
period of the Roman occupation. Low German ad- 
venturers were constantly engaged in descending upon 
the exposed coasts of the English Channel and the 
North Sea. The Low German tribe nearest to the 
Roman provinces was that of the Saxons, and accord- 
ingly these Teutonic pirates, of whatever race, were 
known as Saxons by the provincials, and all English- 
men are still so called by "the modern Celts, in Wales, 
Scotland, and Ireland. 

The outlying Roman provinces were close at hand, 
easy to reach, rich, ill-defended, and a tempting prey 
for the barbaric tribesmen of the north. Setting out 
in their light open skiffs from the islands at the 



2 2 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

mouth of the Elbe, or off the shore afterwards sub- 
merged in what is now the Zuyder Zee, the English 
or Saxon pirates crossed the sea with the prevalent 
north-east wind, and landed all along the provincial 
coasts of Gaul and Britain. As the empire decayed 
under the assaults of the Goths, their ravages turned 
into regular settlements. One great body pillaged, 
age after age, the neighbourhood of Bayeux, where, 
before the middle of the fifth century, it established 
a flourishing colony, and where the towns and villages 
all still bear names of Saxon origin. Another horde 
first plundered and then took up its abode near 
Boulogne, where local names of the English patro- 
nymic type also abound to the present day. In 
Britain itself, at a date not later than the end of the 
fourth century, we find (in the " Notitia Imperii ") an 
officer who bears the title of Count of the Saxon 
Shore, and whose jurisdiction extended from Lincoln- 
shire to Southampton Water. The title probably 
indicates that piratical incursions had already set in 
on Britain, and the duty of the count was most likely 
that of repelling the English invaders. 

As soon as the Romans found themselves com- 
pelled to withdraw their garrison from Britain, leaving 
the provinces to defend themselves as best they 
might, the temptation to the EngHsh pirates became 
a thousand times stronger than before. Though the 
so-called history of the conquest, handed down to us 
by Baeda and the " English Chronicle,"^ is now con- 

For an account of these two main authorities see further 
on, Bseda in chapter xi., and the ** Chronicle" in chapter xviii. 



THE ENGLISH SETTLE IN BRITAIN, 23 

sidered by many enquirers to be mythical in almost 
every particular, the facts themselves speak out for us 
with unhesitating certainty. We know that about the 
middle of the fifth century, shortly after the with- 
drawal of the regular Roman troops, several bodies of 
heathen Anglo-Saxons, belonging to the three tribes 
of Jutes, English, and Saxons, settled e7i masse on 
the south-eastern shores of Britain, from the Frith of 
Forth to the Isle of Wight. . The age of mere 
plundering descents was decisively over, and the age 
of settlement and colonisation had set in. These 
heathen Anglo-Saxons drove away, exterminated, or 
enslaved the Romanised and Christianised Celts, 
broke down every vestige of Roman civilisation, 
destroyed the churches, burnt the villas, laid waste 
many of the towns, and re-introduced a long period 
of pagan barbarism. For a while Britain remains 
enveloped in an age of complete uncertainty, and 
heathen myths intervene between the Christian his- 
torical period of the Romans and the Christian 
historical period initiated by the conversion of Kent. 
Of South-Eastern Britain under the pagan Anglo- 
Saxons we know practically nothing, save by infer- 
ence and analogy, or by the scanty evidence of 
archaeology. 

x^ccording to tradition the Jutes came first. In 
449, says the Celtic legend (the date is quite un- 
trustworthy), they landed in Kent, where they first 
settled in Ruim, which we English call Thanet— then 
really an island, and gradually spread themselves 
over the mainland, capturing the great Roman fortress 



24 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

of Rochester and coast land as far as London. 
Though the details of this story are full of mythical 
absurdities, the analogy of the later Danish colonies 
gives it an air of great probability, as the Danes 
always settled first in islands or peninsulas, and 
thence proceeded to overrun, and finally to annex, 
the adjacent district. A second Jutish horde estab- 
lished itself in the Isle of Wight and on the opposite 
shore of Hampshire. But the whole share borne by 
the Jirtes in the settlement of Britain seems to have 
been but small. 

The Saxons came second in time, if we may believe 
the legends. In 477, ^Ue, with his three sons, is 
said to have landed on the south coast, where he 
founded the colony of the South Saxons, or Sussex. 
In 495, Cerdic and Cynric led another kindred horde 
to the south-western shore, and made the first settle- 
ment of the West Saxons, or Wessex. Of the begin- 
nings of the East Saxon community in Essex, and of 
the Middle Saxons in Middlesex, we know little, even 
by tradition. The Saxons undoubtedly came over in 
large numbers; but a considerable body of their 
fellow-tribesmen still remained upon the Continent, 
where they were still independent and unconverted 
up to the time of Karl the Great. 

The English, on the other hand, apparently mi- 
gi'ated in a body. There is no trace of any English- 
men in Denmark or Germany after the exodus to 
Britain. Their language, of which a dialect still 
survives in Friesland, has utterly died out in Sleswick. 
The EnQ;lish took for their share of Britain the 



THE ENGLISH SETTLE IN BRITAIN. 25 

nearest east coast. We have little record of their 
arrival, even in the legendary story ; we merely learn 
that in 547, Ida "succeeded to the kingdom" of 
the Northumbrians, whence we may possibly con- 
clude that the colony was already established. The 
English settlement extended from the Forth to 
Essex, and was subdivided into Bernicia, Deira, and 
East Anglia. 

Wherever the Anglo-Saxons came, their first work 
was to stamp out with fire and sword every trace of the 
Roman civilisation. Modem investigations amongst 
pagan Anglo-Saxon barrows in Britain show the Low 
German race as pure barbarians, great at destruction, 
but incapable of constructive work. Professor Rolle- 
ston, who has opened several of these early heathen 
tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them every- 
where abundant evidence of " their great aptness at 
destroying, and their great slowness in elaborating, 
material civilisation." Until the Anglo-Saxon received 
from the Continent the Christian religion and the 
Roman culture, he was a mere average Aryan bar- 
barian, with a strong taste for war and plunder, but 
with small love for any of the arts of peace. Wherever 
else, in Gaul, Spain, or Italy, the Teutonic barbarians 
came in contact with the Roman civilisation, they 
received the religion of Christ, and the arts of the 
conquered people, during or before their conquest of 
the country. But in Britain the Teutonic invaders 
remained pagans long after their settlement in the 
island ; and they utterly destroyed, in the south-eastern 
tract, almost every relic of the Roman rule and of 



26 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the Christian faith. Hence we have here the curious 
fact that, during the. fifth and sixth centuries, a belt of 
intrusive and aggressive heathendom intervenes be- 
tween the Christians of the Continent and the 
Christian Welsh and Irish of western Britain. The 
Church of the Celtic Welsh was cut off for more than 
a hundred years from the Churches of the Roman 
world by a hostile and impassable barrier of heathen 
English, Jutes, and Saxons. Their separation pro- 
duced many momentous effects on the after history 
both of the Welsh themselves and of their English 
conquerors. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 27 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 

Though the myths which surround the arrival of the 
EngUsh in Britain have little historical value, they are 
yet interesting for the light which they throw incident- 
ally upon the habits and modes of thought of the 
colonists. They have one character in common with 
all other legends, that they grow fuller and more cir- 
cumstantial the further they proceed from the original 
time. Baeda, who wrote about a.d. 700, gives them 
in a very meagre form : the English Chronicle, com- 
piled at the court of Alfred, about a.d. 900, adds 
several important traditional particulars : while with 
the romantic Geoffrey of Monmouth, a.d. 1152, they 
assume the character of full and circumstantial tales. 
The less men knew about the conquest, the more 
they had to tell about it. 

Among the most sacred animals of the Aryan race 
was the horse. Even in the Indian epics, the sacrifice 
of a horse was the highest rite of the primitive religion. 
Tacitus tells us that the Germans kept sacred white 
horses at the public expense, in the groves and woods 
of the gods : and that from their neighings and 
snortings, auguries were taken. Amongst the people 
of the northern marshlands, the white horse seems 



2 8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

to have been held in especial honour, and to this day 
a white horse rampant forms the cognisance of Han- 
over and Brunswick. The English settlers brought 
this, their national emblem, with them to Britain, and 
cut its figure on the chalk downs as they advanced 
westward, to mark the progress of their conquest. 
The white horses on the Berkshire and Wiltshire hills 
still bear witness to their settlement. A white horse 
is even now the symbol of Kent. Hence it is not 
surprising to learn that in the legendary story of the 
first colonisation, the Jutish leaders who led the 
earliest Teutonic host into Thanet should bear the 
names of Hengest and Horsa, the stallion and the 
mare. They came in three keels — a ridiculously 
inadequate number, considering their size and the 
necessities of a conquering army : and they settled in 
449 (for the legends are always most precise where 
they are least historical) in the Isle of Thanet. "A 
multitude of whelps," says the Welsh monk Gildas, 
" came forth from the lair of the barbaric lioness, in 
three cyuls, as they call them." Vortigern, King of 
the Welsh, had invited them to come to his aid against 
the Picts of North Britain and the Scots of Ireland, 
who were making piratical incursions into the deserted 
province, left unprotected through the heavy levies 
made by the departing Romans. The Jutes attacked 
and conquered the Gaels, but then turned against 
their Welsh allies. 

In 455, the Jutes advanced from Thanet to conquer 
the whole of Kent, " and Hengest and Horsa fought 
with Vortigern the king," says the English Chronicle, 



THE COLONISATION OB' THE COAST. 29 

"at the place that is cleped ^glesthrep ; and there 
men slew Horsa his brother, and after that Hengest 
came to rule, and JEsc his son." One year later, 
Hengest and ^sc fought once more with the Welsh at 
Crayford, ^'and offslew 4,000 men; and the Britons 
then forsook Kent-land, and fled with mickle awe to 
London-bury." In this account we may see a dim 
recollection of the settlement of the two petty Jutish 
kingdoms in Kent, with their respective capitals at 
Canterbury and Rochester, whose separate dioceses 
still point back to the two original principalities. It 
may be w^orth while to note, too, that the name ^sc 
means the ash-tree ; and that this tree was as sacred 
among plants as the horse was among animals. 

Nevertheless, a kernel of truth doubtless lingers in 
the traditional story. Thanet was afterwards one of 
the first landing-places of the Danes : and its isolated 
position — for a broad belt of sea then separated the 
island from the Kentish main — w^ould make it a 
natural post to be assigned by the Welsh to their 
doubtful piratical aUies. The inlet was guarded by 
the great Roman fortress of Rhutupiae : and after the 
fall of that important stronghold, the English may 
probably have occupied the principality of East 
Kent, with its capital of Canterbury. The walls of 
Rochester may have held out longer : and the West 
Kentish kingdom may well have been founded by 
two successful battles at the passage of the Medway 
and the Cray. 

The legend as to the settlement of Sussex is of 
much the same sort. In 477. JElle the Saxon came 



30 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

to Britain also with the suspiciously symmetrical num- 
ber of three ships. With him came his three sons, 
Kymen, Wlencing, and Cissa. These names are 
obviously invented to account for those of three im- 
portant places in the South-Saxon chieftainship. The 
host landed at Kymenes ora, probably Keynor, in the 
Bill of Selsey, then, as its title imports, a separate 
island girt round by the tidal sea : their capital and, 
in days after the Norman conquest, their cathe- 
dral was at Cissanceaster, the Roman Regnum, now 
Chichester : while the third name survives in the 
modern village of Lancing, near Shoreham. The 
Saxons at once fought the natives " and offslew many 
Welsh, and drove some in flight into the wood that is 
lamed Andredes-leag," now the Weald of Kent and 
Sussex. A little colony thus occupied the western 
half of the modern county : but the eastern portion 
still remained in the hands of the Welsh. For awhile 
the great Roman fortress of Anderida (now Pevensey) 
held out against the invaders; until in 491 "^lle 
and Cissa beset Anderida, and offslew all that were 
therein ; nor was there after even one Briton left 
alive." All Sussex became a single Saxon kingdom, 
ringed round by the great forest of the Weald. Here 
again the obviously unhistorical character of the main 
facts throws the utmost doubt upon the nature of the 
details. Yet, in this case too, the central idea itself is 
likely enough, — that the South Saxons first occupied 
the solitary coast islet of Selsey ; then conquered the 
fortress of Regnum and the western shore as far as 
Eastbourne ; and finally captured Anderida and tlie 



THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 31 

eastern half of the county up to the line of the 
Romney marshes. 

Even more improbable is the story of the Saxon 
settlement on the more distant portion of the south 
coast. In 495 "came twain aldermen to Britain, 
Cerdic and Cynric his son, with five ships, at that 
place that is cleped Cerdices ora, and fought that ilk 
day with the Welsh." Clearly, the name of Cerdic 
may be invented solely to account for the name of 
the place : since we see by the sequel that the English 
freely imagined such personages as pegs on which to 
hang their mythical history. ^ For, six years later, one 
Port landed at Portsmouth with two ships, and there 
slew a Welsh nobleman. But we know positively 
that the name of Portsmouth comes from the Latin 
Poj'tus ; and therefore Port must have been simply 
invented to explain the unknown derivation. Still 
more flagrant is the case of Wihtgar, w^ho conquered 
the Isle of Wight, and was buried at Wihtgarasbyrig, 
or Carisbrooke. For the origin of that name is really 
quite different : the Wiht-ware or Wiht-gare are the 
men of Wight, just as the Cant-ware are the men of 
Kent : and Wiht-gara-byrig is the Wight-men's-bury, 
just as Cant-wara-byrig or Canterbury is the Kent- 
men's-bury. Moreover, a double story is told in the 
Chronicle as to the original colonisation of Wessex ; 

Cerdic is apparently a British rather than an English name, 
since Bseda mentions a certain " Cerdic, rex Brettonum." This 
may have been a Caradoc. Perhaps the first element in the names 
Cerdices ora, Cerdices ford, &c., was older than the English 
conquest. The legends are invariably connected with local names 



32 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the first attributing the conquest to Cerdic and Cynric, 
and the second to Stuf and Wihtgar. 

The only other existing legend refers to the great 
English kingdom of Northumbria : and about it the 
English Chronicle, which is mainly West Saxon in 
origin, merely tells us in dry terms under the year 
547, " Here Ida came to rule." There are no details, 
even of the meagre kind, vouchsafed in the south ; 
no account of the conquest of the great Roman town 
of York, or of the resistance offered by the powerful 
Brigantian tribes. But a fragment of some old Nor- 
thumbrian tradition, embedded in the later and 
spurious Welsh compilation which bears the name of 
Nennius, tells us a not improbable tale — that the first 
settlement on the coast of the Lothians was made as 
early as the conquest of Kent, by Jutes of the same 
stock as those who colonised Thanet. A hundred 
years later, the Welsh poems seem to say, Ida " the 
flame-bearer," fought his way down from a petty prin- 
cipality on the Forth, and occupied the whole Nor- 
thumbrian coast, in spite of the stubborn guerilla 
warfare of the despairing provincials. Still less do 
we learn about the beginnings of Mercia, the powerful 
English kingdom which occupied the midlands ; or 
about the first colonisation of East Anglia. In short, 
the legends of the settlement, unhistorical and meagre 
as they are, refer only to the Jutish and Saxon con- 
quests in the south, and tell us nothing at all about 
the origin of the main English kingdoms in the north. 
It is important to bear in mind this fact, because the 
current conceptions as to the spread of the Anglo- 



THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 33 

Saxon race and the extermination of the native Welsh 
are largely based upon the very limited accounts of 
the conquest of Kent and Sussex, and the mournful 
dirges of the Welsh monks or bards. 

It seems improbable, however, that the north- 
eastern coast of Britain, naturally exposed above every 
other part to the ravages of northern pirates, and in 
later days the head-quarters of the Danish intruders 
in our island, should so long have remained free from 
English incursions. If the Teutonic settlers really 
first established themselves here a century later than 
their conquest of Kent, we can only account for it 
by the supposition that York and the Brigantes, the 
old metropolis of the provinces, held out far more 
stubbornly and successfully than Rochester and 
Anderida, with their very servile Romanised popula- 
tion. But even the words of the Chronicle do not 
necessarily imply that Ida was the first king of the 
Northumbrians, or that the settlement of the country 
took place in his days.^ And if they did, we need 
not feel bound to accept their testimony, considering 
that the earliest date we can assign for the composi- 
tion of the chronicle is the reign of Alfred : while 
Baeda, the earlier native Northumbrian historian, 
throws no light at all upon the question. Hence it 

A remarkable passage in the Third Continuator of 
Florence mentions Hyring as the first king of Bernicia, fol- 
lowed by Woden and five other mythical personages, before 
Ida. Clearly, this is mere unhistorical guesswork on the part 
of the monk of Bury ; but it may enclose a genuine tradition 
so far as Hyring is concerned. 

D 



34 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

seems probable that Nennius preserves a truthful 
tradition, and that the English settled in the region 
between the Forth and the Tyne, at least as early as 
the Jutes settled in Kent or the Saxons along the 
South Coast, from Pevensey Bay to Southampton 
Water. 

If, then, we leave out of consideration the etymo- 
logical myths and numerical absurdities of the English 
or Welsh legends, and look only at the facts disclosed to 
us by the subsequent condition of the country, we shall 
find that the early Anglo-Saxon settlements took place 
somewhat after this wise. In the extreme north, the 
English apparently did not care to settle in the rugged 
mountain country between Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 
inhabited by the free and warlike Picts. But from 
the Firth of Forth to the borders of Essex, a succession 
of colonies, belonging to the restricted English tribe, 
occupied the whole provincial coast, burning, plunder- 
ing, and massacring in many places as they went. 
First and northernmost of all came the people whom 
we know by their Latinised title of Bernicians, and 
who descended upon the rocky braes between Forth 
and Tyne. These are the English of Ida's kingdom, 
the modern Lothians and Northumberland. Their 
chief town was at Bebbanburh, now Bamborough, 
which Ida " timbered, and betyned it with a hedge." 
Next in geographical order stood the people of Deira, 
or Yorkshire, who occupied the rich agricultural 
valley of the Ouse, the fertile alluvial tract of Holder- 
ness, and the bleak coast-line from Tyne to Humber. 
Whether they conquered the Roman capital of York, 



THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 35 

or whether it made terms with the invaders, we do 
not know ; but it is not mentioned as the chief town 
of the English kings before the days of Eadwine, 
under whom the. two Northumbrian chieftainships 
were united into a single kingdom. However, as 
Eadwine assumed some of the imperial Roman 
trappings, it seems not unlikely that a portion at 
least of the Romanised population survived the con- 
quest. The two principalities probably spread back 
politically in most places as far as the watershed 
which separates the basins of the German Ocean and 
the Irish Sea ; but the English population seems to 
have hved mainly along the coast or in the fertile 
valley of the Ouse and its tributaries ; for Elmet and 
Loidis, two Welsh principalities, long held out in the 
Leeds district, and the people of the dales and the 
inland parts, as we shall see reason hereafter to con- 
clude, even now show evident marks of Celtic descent. 
Together the two chieftainships were generally known 
by the name of Northumberland, now confined to their 
central portion ; but it must never be forgotten that the 
Eothians, which at present form part of modern 
Scotland, were originally a portion of this early 
English kingdom, and are still, perhaps, more purely 
EngHsh in blood and speech than any other district 
in our island. 

From Humber to the Wash was occupied by a 
second English colony, the men of Lincolnshire, 
divided into three minor tribes, one of which, the 
Gainas, has left its name to Gainsborough. Here, 
again, we hear nothing of the conquest, nor of the 

D 2 



36 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

means by which the powerful Roman colony of 
Lincoln fell into the hands of the English. But the 
town still retains its Roman name, and in part its 
Roman walls ; so that we may conclude the native 
population v/as not entirely exterminated. 

East Anglia, as its name imports, was likewise 
colonised by an English horde, divided, like the men 
of Kent, into two minor bodies, the North Folk and 
the South Folk, whose names survive in the modern 
counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. But in East Anglia, 
as in Yorkshire, we shall see reason hereafter to con- 
clude that 'he lower orders of Welsh were largely 
spared, and that their descendants still form in part 
the labouring classes of the two counties. Here, too, 
the English settlers probably clustered thickest along 
the coast, like the Danes in later days ; and the great 
swampy expanse of the Fens, then a mere waste of 
marshland tenanted by beavers and wild fowl, formed 
the inland boundary or mark of their almost insular 
kingdom. 

The southern half of the coast was peopled by 
Englishmen of the Saxon and Jutish tribes. First 
came the country of the East Saxons, or Essex, the 
flat land stretching from the borders of East Anglia 
to the estuary of the Thames. This had been one of 
the most thickly-populated Roman regions containing 
4he important stations of Camalodunum, London, 
and Verulam. But we know nothing, even by report, 
of its conquest. Beyond it, and separated by the 
fenland of the Lea, lay the outlying little principality 
of Middlesex The upper reaches of the Thames 



THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 37 

were still in the hands of the Welsh natives, for the 
great merchant city of London blocked the way for 
the pirates to the head-waters of the river. 

On the south side of the estuary lay the Jutish 
principalities of East and West Kent, including the 
strong Roman posts of Rhutupiae, Dover, Rochester, 
and Canterbury. The great forest of the Weald and 
the Romney Marshes separated them from Sussex; 
and the insular positions of Thanet and Sheppey had 
always special attractions for the northern pirates. 

Beyond the marshes, again, the strip of southern 
shore, between the downs and the sea, as far as 
Hayling Island, fell into the hands of the South 
Saxons, whose boundary to the east was formed by 
Romney Marsh, and to the west by the flats near 
Chichester, where the forest runs down to the tidal 
swamp by the sea. The district north of the Weald, 
now known as Surrey, was also peopled by Saxon 
freebooters, at a later date, though doubtless far more 
sparsely. 

Finally, along the wooded coast from Portsmouth 
to Poole Harbour, the Gewissas, afterwards known as 
the West Saxons, established their power. The Isle 
of Wight and the region about Southampton Water, 
however, were occupied by the Meonwaras, a small 
intrusive colony of Jutes. Up the rich valley over- 
looked by the great Roman city of Winchester (Venta 
Belgarum), the West Saxons made their way, not 
without severe opposition, as their own legends and 
traditions tell us ; and in Winchester they fixed their 
capital for awhile. The long chain of chalk downs 



38 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

behind the city formed their weak northern mark or 
boundary, while to the west they seem always to have 
carried on a desultory warfare with the yet unsubdued 
Welsh, commanded by their great leader Ambrosius, 
who has left his name to Ambres-byrig, or Amesbury. 

We must not, however, suppose that each of these 
colonies had from the first a united existence as a 
political community. We know that even the eight 
or ten kingdoms into which England was divided at 
the dawn of the historical period were each themselves 
produced by the consolidation of several still smaller 
chieftainships. Even in the two petty Kentish king- 
doms there were under-kings, who had once been 
independent. Wight was a distinct kingdom till the 
reign of Ceadwalla in Wessex. The later province ot 
Mercia was composed of minor divisions, known as 
the Hwiccas, the Middle English, the West Hecan, 
and so forth. Henry of Huntingdon, a historian of 
the twelfth century, who had access, however, to 
several valuable and original sources of information 
now lost, tells us that many chieftains came from 
Germany, occupied Mercia and East Anglia, and 
often fought with one another for the supremacy. 
In fact, the petty kingdoms of the eighth century 
were themselves the result of a consolidation of 
many forgotten principalities founded by the first 
conquerors. 

Thus the earliest England with which we are historic- 
ally acquainted consisted of a mere long strip or border- 
land of Teutonic coast, divided into tiny chieftainships, 
and girding round half of the eastern and southern 



THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST. 30 

shores of a still Celtic Britain. Its area was discon- 
tinuous, and its inland boundaries towards the back 
country were vaguely defined. As Massachusetts 
and Connecticut stood off from Virginia and Georgia 
— as New South Wales and Victoria stand off from 
South Australia and Queensland — so Northumbria 
stood off from East Anglia, and Kent from Sussex. 
Each colony represented a little English nucleus along 
the coast or up the mouths of the greater rivers, such 
as the Thames and Humber, where the pirates could 
easily drive in their light craft. From such a* nucleus, 
perched at first on some steep promontory like Bam- 
borough, some separate island like Thanet, Wight, 
and Selsey, or some long spit of land like Holderness 
and Hurst Castle, the barbarians could extend their 
dominions on every side, till they reached some natural 
line of demarcation in the direction of their nearest 
Teutonic neighbours, which formed their necessary 
mark. Inland they spread as far as they could 
conquer ; but coastwise the rivers and fens were their 
limits against one another. Thus this oldest insular 
England is marked off into at least eight separate 
colonies by the Forth, the Tyne, the Humber, the 
Wash, the Harwich Marshes, the Thames, the Weald 
Forest, and the Chichester tidal swamp region. As 
to how the pirates settled down along this wide stretch 
of coast, we know practically nothing ; of their west- 
ward advance we know a little, and as time proceeds, 
that knowledge becomes more and more. 



40 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER V 

THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES. 

If any trust at all can be placed in the legends, a lull 
in the conquest followed the first settlement, and for 
some fifty years the English — or at least the West 
Saxons — were engaged in consolidating their own 
dominions, without making any further attack upon 
those of the Welsh. It may be well, therefore, to 
enquire what changes of manners had come over them, 
in consequence of their change of place from the 
shores of the Baltic and the North Sea to those of 
the Channel and the German Ocean. 

As a whole, English society remained much the 
same in Britain as it had been in Sleswick and North 
Holland. The English came over in a body, with 
their women and children, their flocks and herds, 
their goods and chattels. The peculiar breed of 
cattle which they brought with them may still be dis- 
tinguished in their remains from the earlier Celtic 
short-horn associated with Roman ruins and pre- 
historic barrqw^s. They came as settlers, not as mere 
marauders ; and they remained banded together in 
their original tribes and families after they had 
occupied the soil of Britain. 

From the moment of their landing in Britain the 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES. 41 

savage corsairs of the Sleswick flats seem wholly to 
have laid aside their seafaring habits. They built no 
more ships, apparently ; for many years after Bishop 
Wilfrith had to teach the South Saxons how to catch 
sea-fish ; while during the early Danish incursions we 
hear distinctly that the English had no vessels ; nor is 
there much incidental mention of shipping between 
the age of the settlement and that of Alfred. The 
new-comers took up their abode at once on the 
richest parts of Roman Britain, and came into full 
enjoyment of orchards which they had not planted 
and fields which they had not sown. The state of 
cultivation in which they found the vale of York and 
the Kentish glens must have been widely different 
from that to which they were accustomed in their 
old heath-clad home. Accordingly, they settled down 
at once into farmers and landowners on a far larger 
scale than of yore ; and they were not anxious to 
move away from the rich lands which they had so 
easily acquired. From being sailors and graziers 
they took to be agriculturists and landmen. In the 
towns, indeed, they did not settle ; and most of 
these continued to bear their old Roman or Celtic 
titles. A few may have been destroyed, especially in 
the first onset, like Anderida, and, at a later date, 
Chester ; but the greater number seem to have been 
still scantily inhabited, under English protection, by a 
mixed urban population, mainly Celtic in blood, and 
known by the name of Loegrians. It was in the 
country, however, that the English conquerers took 
up their abode. They were tillers of the soil, not 



42 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

merchants or skippers, and it was long before they 
acquired a taste for urban life. The whole eastern 
half of England is filled with villages bearing the 
characteristic English clan names, and marking each 
the home of a distinct family of early settlers. As 
soon as the new-comers had burnt the villa of the old 
Roman proprietor, and killed, driven out, or enslaved 
his abandoned serfs, they took the land to themselves 
and divided it out on their national system. Hence 
the whole government and social organisation of 
England is purely Teutonic, and the country even 
lost its old name of Britain for its new one of England. 
In England, as of old in Sleswick, the village com- 
munity formed the unit of English society. Each 
such township was still bounded by its mark of forest, 
mere, or fen, which divided it from its nearest neigh- 
bours. In each lived a single clan, supposed to be 
of kindred blood and bearing a common name. The 
marksmen and their serfs, the latter being conquered 
Welshmen, cultivated the soil under cereals for bread, 
and also for an unnecessarily large supply of beer, as we 
learn at a later date from numerous charters. Cattle 
and horses grazed in the pastures, while large herds of 
pigs were kept in the forest which formed the mark. 
Thus the early English settled down at once from a 
nation of pirates into one of agriculturists. Here and 
there, among the woods and fens which still covered a 
large part of the country, their little separate com- 
munities rose in small fenced clearings or on low 
islets, now joined by drainage to the mainland; 
while in the wider valleys, tilled in Roman times, the 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES 43 

wealthier chieftains formed their settlements and 
allotted lands to their Welsh tributaries. Many 
family names appear in different parts of England, for 
a reason which will hereafter be explained. Thus we 
find the Bassingas at Bassingbourn, in Cambridge- 
shire ; at Bassingfield, in Notts ; at Bassingham and 
Bassingthorpe, in Lincolnshire ; and at Bassington, in 
Northumberland. The Billings have left their stamp 
at Billing, in Northampton ; Billingford, in Norfolk ; 
Billingham, in Durham ; Billingley, in Yorkshire ; 
Billinghurst, in Sussex ; and five other places in 
various other counties. Birmingham, Nottingham, 
Wellington, Faringdon, Warrington, and Wallingford 
are well-known names formed on the same analogy. 
How thickly these clan settlements lie scattered over 
Teutonic England may be judged from the number 
which occur in the London district alone — Kensing- 
ton, Paddington, Notting-hill, Billingsgate, Islington, 
Newington, Kennington, Wapping, and Teddington. 
There are altogether 1,400 names of this type in 
England. Their value as a test of Teutonic colonisa- 
tion is shown by the fact that while 48 occur in Nor- 
thumberland, 127 in Yorkshire, 76 in Lincolnshire, 
153 in Norfolk and Suffolk, 48 in Essex, 60 in Kent, 
and 86 in Sussex and Surrey, only 2 are found in Corn- 
wall, 6 in Cumberland, 24 in Devon, 13 in Worcester, 
2 in Westmoreland, and none in Monmouth. Speak- 
mg generally, these clan names are thickest along the 
original English coast, from Forth to Portland ; they 
decrease rapidly as we move inland ; and they die 
away altogether as we approach the purely Celtic west 



44 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

The English families, however, probably tilled the soil 
by the aid of Welsh slaves ; indeed, in Anglo-Saxon, 
the word serf and Welshman are used almost inter- 
changeably as equivalent synonyms. But though many 
Welshmen were doubtless spared from the very first, 
nothing is more certain than the fact that they became 
thoroughly Anglicized. A few new words from Welsh 
or Latin were introduced into the English tongue, but 
they were far too few sensibly to affect its vocabulary. 
The language was and still is essentially Low German ; 
and though it now contains numerous words of Latin 
or French origin, it does not and never did contain 
any but the very smallest Celtic element. The slight 
number of additions made from fhe Welsh consisted 
chiefly of words connected with the higher Roman 
civilisation — such as wall, street, and Chester — or the 
new methods of agriculture which the Teuton learnt 
from his more civilised serfs. The Celt has always 
shown a great tendency to cast aside his native 
language in Gaul, in Spain, and in Ireland ; and the 
isolation of the English townships must have had the 
effect of greatly accelerating the process. Within a 
few generations the Celtic slave had forgotten his 
tongue, his origin, and his religion, and had developed 
into a pagan English serf. Whatever else the Teu- 
tonic conquest did, it turned every man within the 
English pale into a thorough Englishman. 

But the removal to Britain effected one immense 
change. "War begat the king." In Sleswick the 
English had lived within their little marks as free and 
independent communities. In Britain all the clans of 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES. 45 

each colony gradually came under the military com- 
mand of a king. The ealdormen who led the various 
marauding bands assumed royal power in the new 
country. Such a change was indeed inevitable. For 
not only had the English to win the new England, but 
they had also to keep it and extend it. During four 
hundred years a constant smouldering warfare was 
carried on between the foreigners and the native 
Welsh on their western frontier. Thus the townships 
of each colony entered into a closer union with one 
another for military purposes, and so arose the separate 
chieftainships or petty kingdoms of early England. 
But the king's power was originally very small. He 
was merely the semi-hereditary general and represent- 
ative of the people, of royal stock, but elected by the 
free suffrages of the freemen. Only as the kingdoms 
coalesced, and as the powei of meeting became con- 
sequently less, did the king acquire his greater pre- 
rogatives. From the first, however, he seems to have 
possessed the right of granting public lands, with the 
consent of the freemen, to particular individuals ; and 
such book-land, as the early English called it, after 
the introduction of Roman writing, became the 
origin of our system of private property in land. 

Every township had its moot or assembly of free- 
men, which met around the sacred oak, or on some 
holy hill, or beside the great stone monument of 
some forgotten Celtic chieftain. Every hundred also 
had its moot, and many of these still survive in their 
original form to the present day, being held in the 
open air, near some sacred site or conspicuous land- 



46 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

mark. And the colony as a whole had also its moot, 
at which all freemen might attend, and which settled 
the general affairs of the kingdom. At these last- 
named moots the kings were elected ; and though the 
selection was practically confined to men of royal kin, 
the king nevertheless represented the free choice of 
the tribe. Before the conversion to Christianity, the 
royal families all traced their origin to Woden. Thus 
the pedigree of Ida, King of Northumbria, runs as 
follows : — " Ida was Eopping, Eoppa was Esing, Esa 
was Inguing, Ingui Angenwiting, Angenwit Alocing, 
Aloe Benocing, Benoc Branding, Brand Baldseging, 
Baeldseg Wodening." But in later Christian times 
the chroniclers felt the necessity of reconciling these 
heathen genealogies with the Scriptural account in 
Genesis; so they affiliated Woden himself upon the 
Hebrew patriarchs. Thus the pedigree of the West 
Saxon kings, inserted in the Chronicle under the year 
855, after conveying back the genealogy of ^thelw^ulf 
to Woden, continues to say, " Woden was Frealafing, 
Frealaf Finning," and so on till it reaches " Sceafing, 
id estfilius Noe ; he was born in Noe's Ark. Lamech, 
Mathusalem, Enoc, Jared, Malalehel, Camon, Enos, 
Seth, Kd-diXn., primus homo et paternoster.''^ 

The Anglo-Saxons, when they settled in Eastern 
and Southern Britain, were a horde of barbarous 
heathen pirates. They massacred or enslaved the 
civilised or half- civilised Celtic inhabitants with 
savage ruthlessness. They burnt or destroyed the 
monuments of Roman occupation. They let the roads 
and cities fall into utter disrepair. They stamped out 



THE ENGLISH IN THEIR NEW HOMES 47 

Christianity with fire and sword from end to end of their 
new domain. They occupied a civilised and Christian 
land, and they restored it to its primitive barbarism. 
Nor was there any improvement until Christian 
teachers from Rome and Scotland once more intro- 
duced the forgotten culture which the English pirates 
had utterly destroyed. As Gildas phrases it, with true 
Celtic eloquence, the red tongue of flame licked up 
the whole land from end to end, till it slaked its 
horrid thirst in the western ocean. For 150 years 
the whole of English Britain, save, perhaps, Kent and 
London, was cut off from all intercourse with 
Christendom and the Roman world. The country 
consisted of several petty chieftainships, at constant 
feud wdth their Teutonic neighbours, and perpetually 
waging a border war with Welsh, Picts, and Scots. 
Within each colony, much of the land remained un- 
tilled, while the clan settlements appeared like little 
islands of cultivation in the midst of forest, waste, and 
common. The villages were mere groups of wooden 
homesteads, with barns and cattle-sheds, surrounded 
by rough stockades, and destitute of roads or com- 
munications. Even the palace of the king was a long 
wooden hall with numerous outhouses; for the 
English built no stone houses, and burnt down those 
of their Roman predecessors. Trade seems to have 
been confined to the south coast, and few manufac- 
tured articles of any sort were in use. The English 
degraded their Celtic serfs to their own barbaric level ; 
and the very memory of Roman civilization almost 
died out of the land for a hundred and fifty years. 



48 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE CONQUEST OF THE INTERIOR. 

From the little strip of eastern and southern coast 
on which they first settled, the English advanced 
slowly into the interior by the valleys of the great 
rivers, and finally swarmed across the central dividing 
ridge into the basins of the Severn and the Irish Sea. 
Up the open river mouths they could make their way 
in their shallow-bottomed boats, as the Scandinavian 
pirates did three centuries later; and when they 
reached the head of navigation in each stream for the 
small draught of their light vessels, they probably took 
to the land and settled down at once, leaving further 
inland expeditions to their sons and successors. For 
this second step in the Teutonic colonisation of 
Britain we have some few traditional accounts, which 
seem somewhat more trustworthy than those of the 
first settlement. Unfortunately, however, they apply 
for the most part only to the kingdom of Wessex, and 
not to the North and the Midlands, where such 
details would be of far greater value. 

The valley of the Humber gives access to the great 
central basin of the Trent. Up this fruitful basin, 
at a somewhat later date, apparently, than the settle- 
ment of Deira and Lincolnshire, scattered bodies of 



THE CONQUEST OF THE INTERIOR. 49 

English colonists, under petty leaders whose names 
have been forgotten, seem to have pushed their way 
forward through the broad lowlands towards Derby, 
Nottingham, and Leicester. They bore the name of 
Middle English. Westward, again, other settlers 
raised their capital at Lichfield. These formed the 
advanced guard of the English against the Welsh, and 
hence their country was generally known as the Mark, 
or March, a name which was afterwards latinized into 
the familiar form of Mercia. The absence of all 
tradition as to the colonisation of this important tract, 
the heart of England, and afterwards one of the three 
dominant Anglo-Saxon states, leads one to suppose 
that the process was probably very gradual, and the 
change came about so slowly as to have left but little 
trace on the popular memory. At any rate, it is 
certain that the central ridge long formed the division 
between the two races ; and that the Welsh at this 
period still occupied the whole western watershed, 
except in the lower portion of the Severn valley. 

The Welland, the Nene, and the Great Ouse, flow- 
ing through the centre of the Fen Country, then a 
vast morass, studded with low and marshy islands, 
gave access to the districts about Peterborough, 
Stamford, and Cambridge. Here, too, a body of 
unknown settlers, the Gyrwas, seem about the same 
time to have planted their colonies. At a later date 
they coalesced with the Mercians. However, the 
comparative scarcity of villages bearing the English 
clan names throughout all these regions suggests the 
probability that Mercia, Middle England, and the 
£ 



50 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Fen Country were not by any means so densely 
colonised as the coast districts ; and independent 
Welsh communities long held out among the isolated 
dry tracts of the fens as robbers and outlaws. 

In the south, the advance of the West Saxons had 
been checked in 520, according to the legend, by the 
prowess of Arthur, king of the Devonshire Welsh. 
As Mr. Guest acutely notes, some special cause must 
have been at work to make the Britons resist here so 
desperately as to maintain for half a century a weak 
frontier within little more than twenty miles of Win- 
chester, the West Saxon capital. He suggests that the 
great choir of Ambrosius at Amesbury was probably 
the chief Christian monastery of Britain, and that the 
Welshman may here have been fighting for all that was 
most sacred to him on earth. Moreover, just behind 
stood the mysterious national monument of Stone- 
henge, the honoured tomb of some Celtic or still 
earlier aboriginal chief But in 552, the English 
Chronicle tells us, Cynric, the West Saxon king, crossed 
the downs behind Winchester, and descended upon the 
dale at Salisbury. The Roman town occupied the 
square hill-fort of Old Sarum, and there Cynric put 
the Welsh to flight and took the stronghold by storm. 

The road was thus opened in the rear to the upper 
waters of the Thames (impassable before because of 
the Roman population of London), as well as towards 
the valley of the Bath Avon. Four years later Cynric 
and his son Ceawlin once more advanced as far as 
Barbury hill-fort, probably on a mere plundering raid. 
But in 571 Cuthwulf, brother of Ceawlin, again 



THE CONQUEST OF THE INTERIOR. 51 

marched northward, and " fought against the Welsh 
at Bedford, and took four towns, Lenbury (or 
Leighton Buzzard), Aylesbury, Bensington (near 
Dorchester in Oxfordshire), and Ensham." Thus 
the West Saxons overran the whole upper valley of 
the Thames from Berkshire to above Oxford, and 
formed a junction with the Middle Saxons to the 
north of London ; while eastward they spread as far 
as the northern boundaries of Essex. In 577 the 
same intruders made a still more important move. 
Crossing the central watershed of England, near 
Chippenham, they descended upon the broken valley 
of the Bath Avon, and found themselves the first 
Englishmen who reached any of the basins which 
point westward towards the Atlantic seaboard. At a 
doubtful place named Deorham (probably Dyrham 
near Bath), " Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the 
Welsh, and slew three kings, Conmail, and Condidan, 
and Farinmail, and took three towns from them, 
Gloucester, and Cirencester, and Bath." Thus the 
three great Roman cities of the lower Severn valley 
fell into the hands of the West Saxons, and the 
English for the first time stood face to face with the 
western sea. Though the story of these conquests is 
of course recorded from mere tradition at a much 
later date, it still has a ring of truth, or at least of 
probability, about it, which is wholly wanting to the 
earlier legends. If we are not certain as to the facts, 
we can at least accept them as symbolical of the 
manner in which the West Saxon power wormed its 
way over the upper basin of the Thames, and 
E 2 



52 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

crept gradually along the southern valley of the 
Severn. 

The victory of Deorham has a deeper importance 
of its own, however, than the mere capture of the 
three great Roman cities in the south-west of Britain, 
By the conquest of Bath and Gloucester, the West 
Saxons cut off the Welsh of Devon, Cornwall, and 
Somerset from their brethren in the Midlands and in 
Wales. This isolation of the West Welsh, as the 
English thenceforth called them, largely broke the 
power of the native resistance. Step by step in the 
succeeding age the West Saxons advanced by hard 
fighting, but with no serious difficulty, to the Axe, to 
the Parret, to the Tone, to the Exe, to the Tamar, 
till at last the West Welsh, confined to the peninsula 
of Cornwall, became known merely as the Cornish 
men, and in the reign of ^Ethelstan were finally sub- 
jugated by the English, though still retaining their 
own language and national existence. But in all the 
western regions the Celtic population was certainly 
spared to a far greater extent than in the east ; and 
the position of the English might rather be described 
as an occupation than as a settlement in the strict 
sense of the word. 

The westward progress of the Northumbrians is 
later and much more historical. Theodoric, son of 
Ida, as we may perhaps infer from the old Welsh 
ballads, fought long and not always successfully with 
Urien of Strathclyde. But in 592, says Baeda, who 
lived himself but three-quarters of a century later 
than the event he describes, " there reigned over the 



THE CONQUEST OF THE INTERIOR. 53 

kingdom of the Northumbrians a most brave and 
ambitious king, ^thelfrith, who, more than all other 
nobles of the English, wasted the race of the Britons ; 
for no one of our kings, no one of our chieftains, has 
rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an 
integral part of the English territories, whether by 
subjugating or expatriating the natives." In 606 
^thelfrith rounded the Peakland, now known as 
Derbyshire, and marched from the upper Trent upon 
the Roman city of Chester. There " he made a 
terrible slaughter of the perfidious race." Over two 
thousand Welsh monks from the monastery of Bangor 
Iscoed were slain by the heathen invader ; but Baeda 
explains that ^thelfrith put them to death because 
they prayed against him ; a sentence which strongly 
suggests the idea that the English did not usually kill 
non-combatant Welshmen. 

The victory of Chester divided the Welsh power in 
the north as that of Deorham had divided it in the 
south. Henceforward, the Northumbrians bore rule 
from sea to sea, from the mouth of the Humber to the 
mouths of the Mersey and the Dee. ^thelfrith 
even kept up a rude navy in the Irish Sea. Thus the 
Welsh nationality was broken up into three separate 
and weak divisions — Strathclyde in the north, Wales 
in the centre, and Damnonia, or Cornwall, in the 
south. Against these three fragments the English 
presented an unbroken and aggressive front, North- 
umbria standing over against Strathclyde, Mercia 
steadily pushing its way along the upper valley of the 
Severn against North Wales, and Wessex advancing 



54 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

in the south against South Wales and the West Welsh 
of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. Thus the con- 
quest of the interior was practically complete. There 
still remained, it is true, the subjugation of the west ; 
but the west was brought under the English overlord- 
ship by slow degrees, and in a very different manner 
from the east and the south coast, or even the central 
belt. Cornwall finally yielded under ^thelstan ; 
Strathclyde was gradually absorbed by the English in 
the south and the Scottish kingdom on the north ; 
and the last remnant of Wales only succumbed to the 
intruders under the rule of ,:he Angevin Edward I. 

There were, in fact, three epochs of English exten- 
sion in Britain. The first epoch was one of colonisa- 
tion on the coasts and along the valleys of the 
eastward rivers. The second epoch was one of con- 
quest and partial settlement in the central plateau and 
the westward basins. The third epoch was one of 
merely political subjugation in the western mountain 
regions. The proofs of these assertions we must 
examine at length in the succeeding chapter. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 55 



CHAPTER VII 

THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE ENGLISH 
SETTLEMENT. 

It has been usual to represent the English conquest 
of South-eastern Britain as an absolute change of race 
throughout the greater part of our island. The 
Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly believed, came to Eng- 
land and the Lowlands of Scotland in overpowering 
numbers, and actually exterminated or drove into the 
rugged west the native Celts. The population of the 
whole country south of Forth and Clyde is supposed 
to be now, and to have been ever since the conquest, 
purely Teutonic or Scandinavian in blood, save only 
in Wales, Cornwall, and, perhaps, Cumberland and 
Galloway. But of late years this belief has met with 
strenuous opposition from several able scholars ; and 
though many of our greatest historians still uphold 
the Teutonic theory, with certain modifications and 
admissions, there are, nevertheless, good reasons 
which may lead us to believe that a large proportion 
of the Celts were spared as tillers of the soil, and 
that Celtic blood may yet be found abundantly even 
in the most Teutonic portions of England. 

In the first place, it must be remembered that, by 
common consent, only the east and south coasts and 



56 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the country as far as the central dividing ridge can be 
accounted as to any overwhelming extent English in 
blood. It is admitted that the population of the 
Scottish Highlands, of Wales, and of Cornwall is 
certainly Celtic. It is also admitted that there exists 
a large mixed population of Celts and Teutons in 
Strathclyde and Cumbria, in Lancashire, in the Severn 
Valley, in Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. The northern 
and western half of Britain is acknowledged to be 
mainly Celtic. Thus the question really narrows itself 
down to the ethnical peculiarities of the south and east. 
Here, the surest evidence is that of anthropology. 
We know that the pure Anglo-Saxons were a round- 
skulled, fair-haired, light-eyed, blonde-complexioned 
race ; and we know that wherever (if anywhere) we 
find unmixed Germanic races at the present day, 
High Dutch, Low Dutch, or Scandinavian, we always 
meet with some of these same personal peculiarities 
in almost every individual of the community. But 
we also know that the Celts, originally themselves a 
similar blonde Aryan race, mixed largely in Britain 
with one or more long-skulled dark-haired, black- 
eyed, and brown-complexioned races, generally identi- 
fied with the Basques or Euskarians, and with the 
Ligurians. The nation which resulted from this mix- 
ture showed traces of both types, being sometimes 
blonde, sometimes brunette ; sometimes black-haired, 
sometimes red-haired, and sometimes yellow-haired. 
Individuals of all these types are still found in the 
undoubtedly Celtic portions of Britain, though the 
dark type there unquestionably preponderates so far 



IHE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. 57 

as numbers are concerned. It is this mixed race of 
fair and dark people, of Aryan Celts with non-Aryan 
Euskarians or Ligurians, which we usually describe as 
Celtic in modern Britain, by contradistinction to the 
later wave of Teutonic English. 

Now, according to the evidence of the early 
historians, as interpreted by Mr. Freeman and other 
authors (whose arguments we shall presently 
examine), the English settlers in the greater part of 
South Britain almost entirely exterminated the Celtic 
population. But if this be so, how comes it that at 
the present day a large proportion of our people, even 
in the east, belong to the dark and long-skulled type ? 
The fact is that upon this subject the historians are 
largely at variance with the anthropologists ; and as 
the historical evidence is weak and inferential, while 
the anthropological evidence is strong and direct, 
there can be very little doubt which we ought to 
accept. Professor Huxley [Essay ' ' On some Fixed 
Points in British Ethnography,"] has shown that the 
melanochroic or dark type of Englishmen is identical 
in the shape of the skull, the anatomical peculiarities, 
and the colour of skin, hair, and eyes with that of the 
continent, which is undeniably Celtic in the wider 
sense — that is to say, belonging to the primitive non- 
Teutonic race, which spoke a Celtic language, and 
was composed of mixed Celtic, Iberian, and Ligurian 
elements. Professor Phillips points out that in York- 
shire, and especially in the plain of York, an essen- 
tially dark, short, non-Teutonic type is common ; 
while persons of the sam'e characteristics abound 



58 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

among the supposed pure Anglians of Lincolnshire. 
They are found in great numbers in East Anglia, and 
they are not rare even in Kent. In Sussex and Essex 
they occur less frequently, and they are also com- 
paratively scarce in the Lothians. Dr. Beddoe, Dr. 
Thurnam, and other anthropologists have collected 
much evidence to the same effect. Hence we may 
conclude with great probability that large numbers of 
the descendants of the dark Britons still survive even 
on the Teutonic coast. As to the descendants of the 
light Britons, we cannot, of course, separate them 
from those of the like-complexioned English invaders. 
But in truth, even in the east itself, save only perhaps 
in Sussex and Essex, the dark and fair types have 
long since so largely coalesced by marriage that there 
are probably few or no real Teutons or real Celts 
individually distinguishable at all. Absolutely fair 
people, of the Scandinavian or true German sort, with 
very light hair and very pale blue eyes, are almost 
unknown among us ; and when they do occur, they 
occur side by side with relations of every other shade. 
As a rule, our people vary infinitely in complexion 
and anatomical type, from the quite squat, long-headed, 
swarthy peasants whom we sometimes meet with in 
rural Yorkshire, to the tall, flaxen-haired, red-cheeked 
men whom we occasionally find not only in Danish 
Derbyshire, but even in mainly Celtic Wales and 
Cornwall. As to the west. Professor Huxley declares, 
on purely anthropological grounds, that it is probably, 
on the whole, more deeply Celtic than Ireland itself. 
These anthropological opinions are fully -borne out 



THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. 59 

by those scientific archaeologists who have done most 
in the way of exploring the tombs and other remains 
of the early Anglo-Saxon invaders. Professor RoUe- 
ston, who has probably examined more skulls of this 
period than any other investigator, sums up his con- 
sideration of those obtained from Romano-British 
and Anglo-Saxon interments by saying, " I should be 
inclined to think that wholesale massacres of the con- 
quered Romano-Britons were rare, and that wholesale 
importations of Anglo-Saxon women were not much 
more frequent." He points out that " we have 
anatomical evidence for saying that two or more 
distinct varieties of men existed in England both 
previously to and during the period of the Teutonic 
invasion and domination." The interments show us 
that the races which inhabited Britain before the 
English conquest continued in part to inhabit it after 
that conquest. The dolichocephali, or long-skulled 
type of men, who, in part, preceded the English, 
'' have been found abundantly in the Suffolk region 
of the Littus Saxonicum, where the Celt and Saxon 
[Englishman] are not known to have met as enemies 
when East Anglia became a kingdom." Thus we see 
that just where people of the dark type occur abund- 
antly at the present day, skulls of the corresponding 
sort are met with abundantly in interments of the 
Anglo-Saxon period. Similarly, Mr. Akerman, after 
explorations in tombs, observes, " The total expulsion 
or extinction of the Romano-British population by 
the invaders will scarcely be insisted upon in this age 
of enquiry." Nay, even in Teutonic Kent, Jute and 



6o ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Briton still lie side by side in the same sepulchres. 
Most modern Englishmen have somewhat long rather 
than round skulls. The evidence of archaeology 
supports the evidence of anthropology in favour of 
the belief that some, at least, of the native Britons 
were spared by the invading host. 

On the other hand, against these unequivocal testi- 
monies of modern research we have to set the testi- 
mony of the early historical authorities, on which the 
Teutonic theory mainly relies. The authorities in 
question are three, Gildas, Baeda, and the English 
Chronicle. Gildas was, or professes to be, a British 
monk, who wrote in the very midst of the English 
conquest, when the invaders were still confined, for 
the most part, to the south-eastern region. Objections 
have been raised to the authenticity of his work, a 
small rhetorical Latin pamphlet, entitled, "The 
History of the Britons ;" but these objections have, 
perhaps, been set at rest for many minds by Dr. Guest 
and Mr. Green. Nevertheless, what little Gildas has 
to tell us is of slight historical importance. His book 
is a disappointing Jeremiad, couched in the florid 
and inflated Latin rhetoric so common during the 
decadence of the Roman empire, intermingled with a 
strong flavour of hyperbolical Celtic imagination ; and 
it teaches us practically nothing as to the state of the 
conquered districts. It is wholly occupied with fierce 
diatribes against the Saxons, and complaints as to the 
weakness, wickedness, and apathy of the British chief- 
tains. It says little that can throw any light on the 
question as to whether the Welsh were largely spared, 



THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. 6 1 

though it abounds with wild and vague declamation 
about the extermination of the natives. Even Gildas, 
however, mentions that some of his countrymen, 
" constrained by famine, came and yielded themselves 
up to their enemies as slaves for ever;" while others, 
"committing the safeguard of their lives to moun- 
tains, crags, thick forests, and rocky isles, though 
with trembling hearts, remained in their fatherland." 
These passages certainly suggest that a Welsh rem- 
nant survived in two ways within the English pale, 
first as slaves, and secondly as isolated outlaws. 

Bgeda stands on a very different footing. His 
authenticity is undoubted; his language is simple 
and straightforward. He was born in or about the 
year 672, only two hundred years after the landing of 
the first English colonists in Thanet. Scarcely more 
than a century separated him from the days of Ida. 
The constant lingering warfare with the Welsh on the 
western frontier was still for him a living fact. The 
Celt still held half of Britain. At the date of his 
birth the northern Welsh still retained their inde- 
pendence in Strathclyde ; the Welsh proper still spread 
to the banks of the Severn ; and the West Welsh of 
Cornwall still owned all the peninsula south of the 
Bristol Channel as far eastward as the Somersetshire 
marshes. Beyond Forth and Clyde, the Picts yet 
ruled over the greater part of the Highlands, while 
the Scots, who have now given the name of Scotland 
to the whole of Britain beyond the Cheviots, were a 
mere intrusive Irish colony in Argyllshire and the 
Western Isles. He lived, in short, at the very period 



62 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

when Britain was still in the act of becoming England ; 
and no historical doubts of any sort hang oyer the 
authenticity of his great work, "The Ecclesiastical 
History of the English people." But Baeda unfortu- 
nately knows little more about the first settlement 
than he could learn from Gildas, whom he quotes 
almost verbatwt. He tells us, however, nothing of ex- 
termination of the Welsh. " Some," he says, " were 
slaughtered; some gave themselves up to undergo 
slavery : some retreated beyond the sea : and some, 
remaining in their own land, lived a miserable life in 
the mountains and forests." In all this, he is merely 
transcribing Gildas, but he saw no improbability in 
the words. At a later date, ^thelfrith, of Northum- 
bria, he tells us, " rendered more of their lands either 
tributary to or an integral part of the English territory, 
whether by subjugating or expatriating ^ the natives," 
than any previous king. Eadwine, before his con- 
version, " subdued to the empire of the English the 
Mevanian islands," Man and Anglesey ; but we know 
that the population of both islands is still mainly 
Celtic in blood and speech. These examples suffi- 
ciently show us, that even before the introduction of 
Christianity, the English did not always utterly destroy 
the Welsh inhabitants of conquered districts. And 
it is universally admitted that, after their conversion, 
they fought with the Welsh in a milder manner, 

' The word in the original is extenninatis, but of course 
exterminare then bore its etymological sense of expatriation or 
expulsion, if not merely of confiscation, while it certainly did 
not imply the idea of slaughter, connoted by the modern word. 



THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SiCTTLEMENT. 63 

sparing their lives as fellow-Christians, and permitting 
them to retain their lands as tributary proprietors. 

The English Chronicle, our third authority, was 
first compiled at the court of ^Elfred, four and a-half 
centuries after the Conquest ; and so its value as 
original testimony is very slight. Its earlier portions 
are mainly condensed from Baeda ; but it contains a 
few fragments of traditional information from some 
other unknown sources. These fragments, however, 
refer chiefly to Kent, Sussex, and the older parts of 
Wessex, where we have reason to believe that the 
Teutonic colonisation was exceptionally thorough ; 
and they tell us nothing about Yorkshire, Lincoln- 
shire, and East Anglia, where we find at the present 
day so large a proportion of the population possessing 
an unmistakably Celtic physique. The Chronicle 
undoubtedly describes the conflict in the south as 
sharp and bloody; and in spite of the mythical 
character of the names and events, it is probable that 
in this respect it rightly preserves the popular memory 
of the conquest, and its general nature. In Kent, 
" the Welsh fled the English like fire ; " and Hengest 
and JEsc, in a single battle, slew 4,000 men. In 
Sussex, ^lle and Cissa killed or drove out the 
natives in the western rapes on their first landing, and 
afterwards massacred every Briton at Anderida. In 
Wessex, in the first struggle, " Cerdic and Cynric off- 
slew a British king whose name was Natanleod, and 
5,000 men with him." And so the dismal annals 
of rapine and slaughter run on from year to year, 
with simple, unquestioning conciseness, showing 



64 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

US, at least, the manner in which the later English 
believed their forefathers had acquired the land. 
Moreover, these frightful details accord well enough 
with the vague generalities of Gildas, from which, 
however, they may very possibly have been manu- 
factured. Yet even the Chronicle nowhere speaks 
of absolute extermination : that idea has been wholly 
read into its words, not directly inferred from them. 
A great deal has been made of the massacre at 
Pevensey ; but we hear nothing of similar massacres 
at the great Roman cities — at London, at York, at 
Verulam, at Bath, at Cirencester, which would surely 
have attracted more attention than a small outlying 
fortress like Anderida. Even the Teutonic champions 
themselves admit that some, at least, of the Celts 
were incorporated into the English community. 
"The women," says Mr. Freeman, "would, doubtless, 
be largely spared ; " while as to the men, he observes, 
"we may be sure that death, emigration, or personal 
slavery were the only alternatives which the van- 
quished found at the hands of our fathers." But 
there is a vast gulf, from the ethnological point of 
view, between exterminating a nation and enslaving it.^ 
In the cities, indeed, it would seem that the 
Britons remained in great numbers. The Welsh 
bards complain that the urban race of Romanised 
natives known as Loegrians, "became as Saxons." 

' In this and a few other cases, modern authorities are quoted 
merely to show that the essential facts of a large Welsh survival 
are really admitted even by those who most strongly argue in 
favour of the general Teutonic origin of Englishmen. 



•I HE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. 65 

Mr. Kemble has shown that the English did not by 
any means always massacre the inhabitants of the 
cities. Mr. Freeman observes, " It is probable that 
within the [English] frontier there still were Roman 
towns tributary to the conquerors rather than occupied 
by them ; " and Canon Stubbs himself remarks, that 
" in some of the cities there were probably elements 
of continuous life : London, the mart of the merchants, 
York, the capital of the north, and some others, have 
a continuous political existence." "Wherever the 
cities were spared," he adds, "a portion, at least, of 
the city population must have continued also. In 
the country, too, especially towards the west and the 
debateable border, great numbers of Britons may 
have survived in a servile or half-servile condition." 
But we must remember that in only two cases, Ande- 
rida and Chester, do we actually hear of massacres ; 
in all the other towns, Bseda and the Chronicle 
tell us nothing about them. It is a significant fact 
that Sussex, the one kingdom in which we hear of a 
complete annihilation, is the very one where the 
Teutonic type of physique still remains the purest. 
But there are nowhere any traces of English clan 
nomenclature in any of the cities. They all retain 
their Celtic or Roman names. At Cambridge itself, 
in the heart of the true English country, the charter 
of the thegn's guild, a late document, mentions a 
special distinction of penalties for killing a Welshman, 
"if the slain be a ceorl, 2 ores, if he be a Welshman, 
one ore." "The large Romanised towns," says Pro- 
fessor Rolleston, "no doubt made terms with the 

F 



66 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Saxons, who abhorred city life, and would probably 
be content to leave the unwarlike burghers in a con- 
dition of heavily-taxed submissiveness." 

Thus, even in the east it is admitted that a Celtic 
element probably entered into the population in 
three ways, — by sparing the women, by making rural 
slaves of the men. and by preserving some, at least, 
of the inhabitants of cities. The skulls of these 
Anglicised Welshmen are found in ancient interments ; 
their descendants are still to be recognised by their 
physical type in modern England. "It is quite 
possible," says Mr. Freeman, " that even at the end 
of the sixth century there may have been within the 
English frontier inaccessible points where detached 
bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious inde- 
pendence." Sir F. Palgrave has collected passages 
tending to show that parties of independent Welsh- 
men held out in the Fens till a very late period ; and 
this conclusion is admitted by Mr. Freeman to be 
probably correct. But more important is the general 
survival of scattered Britons within the English com- 
munities themselves. Traces of this we find even in 
Anglo-Saxon documents. The signatures to very 
early charters,^ collected by Thorpe and Kemble, 
supply us with names some of which are assuredly 
not Teutonic, while others are demonstrably Celtic ; 
and these names are borne by people occupying high 
positions at the court of English kings. Names of 
this class occur even in Kent itself; w^hile others are 
borne by members of the royal family of Wessex. 
, ' Kemble "On Anglo-Saxon Names." Proc. Arch. Inst., 1845 



THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SEITLEMENT. 67 

The local dialect of the West Riding of Yorkshire 
still contains many Celtic words; and the shepherds 
of Northumberland and the Lothians still reckon their 
sheep by what is known as " the rhyming score," 
which is really a corrupt form of the Welsh numerals 
from one to twenty. The laws of Northumbria men- 
tion the Welshmen who pay rent to the king. Indeed, 
it is clear that even in the east itself the English were 
from the first a body of rural colonists and land- 
owners, holding in subjection a class of native serfs, 
with whom they did not intermingle, but who gradually 
became Anglicised, and finally coalesced with their 
former masters, under the stress of the Danish and 
Norman supremacies. 

In the west, however, the English occupation took 
even less the form of a regular colonisation. The 
laws of Ine, a West Saxon king, show us that in his 
territories, bordering on yet unconquered British 
lands, the Welshman often occupied the position of 
a rent-paying inferior, as well as that of a slave. The 
so-called Nennius tells us that Elmet in Yorkshire, 
long an intrusive Welsh principality, was not subdued 
by the English till the reign of Eadwine of Nor- 
thumbria ; when, we learn, the Northumbrian prince 
"seized Elmet, and expelled Cerdic its king:" but 
nothing is said as to any extermination of its people. 
As Baeda incidentally mentions this Cerdic, " king of 
the Britons," Nennius may probably be trusted upon 
the point. As late as the beginning of the tenth 
century, King Alfred in his will describes the people 
of Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Wilts, as " Welsh 
F 2 



68 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

kin." The physical appearance of the peasantry in 
the Severn valley, and especially in Shropshire, Wor- 
cestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire, indi- 
cates that the western parts of Mercia were equally 
Celtic in blood. The dialect of Lancashire contains 
a large Celtic infusion. Similarly, the English clan- 
villages decrease gradually in numbers as we move 
westward, till they almost disappear beyond the 
central dividing ridge. We learn from Domesday 
Book that at the date of the Norman conquest the 
number of serfs was greater from east to west, and 
largest on the Welsh border. Mr. Isaac Taylor 
points out that a similar argument may be derived 
from the area of the hundreds in various counties, 
The hundred was originally a body of one hundred 
English families (more or less), bound together by 
mutual pledge, and answerable for one another's 
conduct. In Sussex, the average number of square 
miles in each hundred is only twenty-three ; in Kent, 
twenty-four ; in Surrey, fifty-eight ; and in Herts, 
seventy-nine : but in Gloucester it is ninety-seven ; 
in Derby, one hundred and sixty-two ; in Warwick, 
one hundred and seventy-nine ; and in Lancashire, 
three hundred and two. These facts imply that the 
English population clustered thickest in the old 
settled east, but grew thinner and thinner towards 
the Welsh and Cumbrian border. Altogether, the 
historical evidence regarding the western slopes of 
England bears out Professor Huxley's dictum as to 
the thoroughly Celtic character of their population. 
On the other hand, it is impossible to deny that 



THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. 69 

Mr. Freeman and Canon Stubbs have proved their 
point as to the thorough Teutonisation of Southern 
Britain by the EngHsh invaders. Though it may be 
true that much Welsh blood survived in England, 
especially amongst the servile class, yet it is none the 
less true that the nation which rose upon the ruins of 
Roman Britain was, in form and organisation, almost 
purely English. The language spoken by the whole 
country was the same which had been spoken in 
Sleswick. Only a few words of Welsh origin relating 
to agriculture, houseliold service, and smithcraft, were 
introduced by the serfs into the tongue of their 
masters. The dialects of the Yorkshire moors, of 
the Lake District, and of Dorset or Devon, spoken 
only by wild herdsmen in the least cultivated tracts, 
retained a few more evident traces of the Welsh 
vocabulary : but in York, in London, in Winchester, 
and in all the large towns, the pure Anglo-Saxon of 
the old England by the shores of the Baltic was alone 
spoken. The Celtic serfs and their descendants 
quickly assumed English names, talked English to 
one another, and soon forgot, in a few generations, 
that they had not always been Englishmen in blood 
and tongue. The whole organisation of the state, 
the whole social life of the people, was entirely 
Teutonic. "The historical civilisation," as Canon 
Stubbs admirably puts it, " is English and not Celtic." 
Though there may have been much Welsh blood left, 
it ran in the veins of serfs and rent-paying churls, who 
were of no political or social importance. These 
two aspects of the case should be kept carefully 



70 ' ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

distinct. Had they always been separated, much of 
the discussion which has arisen on the subject would 
doubtless have been avoided ; for the strongest advo- 
cates of the Teutonic theory are generally ready to 
allow that Celtic women, children, and slaves may 
have been largely spared : while the Celtic enthusiasts 
have thought incumbent upon them to derive English 
words from Welsh roots, and to trace the origin of 
English social institutions to Celtic models. The 
facts seem to indicate that while the modern English 
nation is largely Welsh in blood, it is wholly Teutonic 
in form and language. Each of us probably traces 
back his descent to mixed Celtic and Germanic 
ancestry : but while the Celts have contributed the 
material alone, the Teutons have contributed both 
the material and the form. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 71 



CHAPTER VIII 

HEATHEN ENGLAND. 

We can now picture to ourselves the general aspect 
of the country after the English colonies had estab- 
lished themselves as far west as the Somersetshire 
marshes, the Severn, and the Dee= The whole land 
was occupied by little groups of Teutonic settlers, 
each isolated by the mark within their own township ; 
each tilling the ground with their own hands and 
those of their Welsh serfs. The townships were 
rudely gathered together into petty chieftainships; 
and these chieftainships tended gradually to aggregate 
into larger kingdoms, which finally merged in the 
three great historical divisions of Northumbria, 
Mercia, and Wessex ; divisions that survive to our 
own time as the North, the Midlands, and the South. 
Meanwhile, most of the Roman towns were slowly 
depopulated and fell into disrepair, so that a "waste 
Chester" becomes a common object in Anglo-Saxon 
history. Towns belong to a higher civilisation, and 
had little place in agricultural England. The roads 
were neglected for want of commerce ; and trade 
only survived in London and along the coast of Kent, 
where the discovery of Frank ish coins proves the 
existence of intercourse with the Teutonic kingdom 



72 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

of Neustria, which had grown up on the ruins of 
northern Gaul. Everywhere in Britain the Roman 
civilisation fell into abeyance : in improved agriculture 
alone did any notable relic of its existence remain. 
The century and a half between the conquest and 
the arrival of Augustine is a dreary period of unmixed 
barbarism and perpetual anarchy. 

From time to time the older setded colonies kept 
sending out fresh swarms of young emigrants towards 
the yet unconquered west, much as the Americans and 
Canadians have done in our own days. Armed with 
their long swords and battle-axes, the new colonists 
went forth in family bands, under petty chieftains, 
to war against the Welsh ; and when they had 
conquered themselves a district, they settled on it as 
lords of the soil, enslaved the survivors of their 
enemies, and made their leader into a king. Mean- 
while, the older colonies kept up their fighting spirit 
by constant wars amongst themselves. Thus we read 
of contests between the men of Kent and the West 
Saxons, or between conflicting nobles in Wessex 
itself. Fighting, in fact, was the one business of the 
English freeman, and it was but slowly that he settled 
down into a quiet agriculturist. The influence of 
Christianity alone seems to have wrought the change. 
Before the conversion of England, all the glimpses 
which we get of the English freeman represent him 
only as a rude and turbulent warrior, with the very 
spirit of his kinsmen, the later wickings of the 
north. 

An enormous amount of the country stiU remained 



HEATHEN ENGLAND. 73 

overgrown with wild forest. The whole weald of 
Kent and Sussex, the great tract of Selwood in 
Wessex, the larger part of Warwickshire, the entire 
Peakland, the central dividing ridge between the two 
seas from Yorkshire to the Forth, and other wide 
regions elsewhere, were covered with primaeval wood- 
lands. Arden, Charnwood, Wychwood, Sherwood, 
and the rest, are but the relics of vast forests which 
once stretched over half England. The bear still 
lurked in the remotest thickets ; packs of wolves still 
issued forth at night to ravage the herdsman's folds ; 
wild boars wallowed in the fens or munched acorns 
under the oakwoods ; deer ranged over all the heathy 
tracts throughout the whole island ; and the wild 
white cattle, now confined to Chillingham Park, 
roamed in many spots from north to south. Hence 
hunting was the chief pastime of the princes and 
ealdormen when they were not engaged in war with 
one another or with the Welsh. Game, boar-flesh, 
and venison formed an important portion of diet 
throughout the whole early English period, up to the 
Norman conquest, and long after. 

The king was the recognised head of each commu- 
nity, though his position was hardly more than that 
of leader of the nobles in war. He received an 
original lot in the conquered land, and remained a 
private possessor of estates, tilled by his Welsh slaves. 
He was king of the people, not of the country, and 
is always so described in the early monuments. 
Each king seems to have had a chief priest in his 
kingdom. 



74 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Theie was no distinct capital for the petty king- 
doms, though a principal royal residence appears to 
have been usual. But the kings possessed many 
separate hains or estates in their domain, in each of 
which food and other material for their use were 
collected by their serfs. They moved about with 
their suite from one of these to another, consuming 
all that had been prepared for them in each, and then 
passing on to the next. The king himself made the 
journey in the waggon drawn by oxen, which formed 
his rude prerogative. Such primitive royal progresses 
were absolutely necessary in so disjointed a state of 
society, if the king was to govern at all. Only by 
moving about and seeing with his own eyes could he 
gain any information in a country where organisation 
was feeble and writing practically unknown : only by 
consuming what was grown for him on the spot where 
it was grown could he and his suite obtain provisions 
in the rude state of Anglo-Saxon communications. 
But such government as existed was mainly that of 
the local ealdormen and the village gentry. 

Marriages were practically conducted by purchase, 
the wife being bought by the husband from her father's 
family. A relic of this custom perhaps still survives 
in the modern ceremony, when the father gives the 
bride in marriage to the bridegroom. Polygamy wa's 
not unknown ; and it was usual for men to marry 
their father's widows. The wives, being part of the 
father's property, naturally became part of the son's 
heritage. Fathers probably possessed the right of 
seUing their children into slavery ; and we know that 



HEATHEN ENGLAND. 75 

English slaves were sold at Rome, being conveyed 
thither by Frisian merchants. 

The artizan class, such as it was, must have been 
attached to the houses of the chieftains, probably in a 
servile position. Pottery was manufactured of ex- 
cellent but simple patterns. Metal work was, of course, 
thoroughly understood, and the Anglo-Saxon swords 
and knives discovered in barrows are of good con- 
struction. Every chief had also his minstrel, who 
sang the short and jerky Anglo-Saxon songs to the 
accompaniment of a harp. The dead were burnt and 
their ashes placed in tumuli in the north : the southern 
tribes buried their warriors in full military dress, and 
from their tombs much of the little knowledge which 
we possess as to their habits is derived. Thence 
have been taken their swords, a yard long, with orna- 
mental hilt and double-cutting edge, often covered by 
runic inscriptions ; their small girdle knives ; their 
long spears ; and their round, leather-faced, wooden 
shields. The jewellery is of go-Id, enriched with 
coloured enamel, pearl, or sliced garnet. Buckles, 
rings, bracelets, hairpins, necklaces, scissors, and 
toilet requisites were also buried with the dead. 
Glass drinking-cups, which occur amongst the tombs, 
were probably imported from the continent to Kent 
or London ; and some small trade certainly existed 
with the Roman world, as we learn from Baeda. 

In faith the English remained true to their old 
Teutonic myths. Their intercourse with the Christian 
Welsh was not of a kind to make them embrace the 
religion which must have seemed to them that of 



76 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

slaves and enemies. Bseda tells us that the English 
worshipped idols, and sacrificed oxen to their gods. 
Many traces of their mythology are still left in our midst. 
First in importance among their deities came 
Woden, the Odin of our Scandinavian kinsmen, 
whose name we still preserve in Wednesday (dies 
Mercurii). To him every royal family of the English 
traced its descent. Mr. Kemble has pointed out 
many high places in England which keep his name 
to the present day. Wanborough, in Surrey, at the 
heaven-water-parting of the Hog's Back, was originally 
Wodnesbeorh, or the hill of Woden. Wanborough, 
in Wiltshire, which divides the valleys of the Kennet 
and the Isis, has the same origin ; as has also Wood- 
nesborough in Kent. Wonston, in Hants, was pro- 
bably Woden's stone ; Wambrook, Wampool, and 
Wansford, his brook, his pool, and his ford. All these 
names are redolent of that nature-worship which was 
so marked a portion of the Anglo-Saxon religion. 
Godshill, in the Isle of Wight, now crowned by a 
Christian church, was also probably the site of early 
Woden worship. The boundaries of estates, as men- 
tioned in charters, give instances of trees, stones, and 
posts, used as landmarks, and dedicated to Woden, 
thus conferring upon them a religious sanction, like 
that of Hermes amongst the Greeks. Anglo-Saxon 
worship generally gathered around natural features ; 
and sacred oaks, ashes, wells, hills, and rivers are 
among the commonest memorials of our heathen 
ancestors. Many of them were reconsecrated after the 
introduction of Christianity to saints of the church, 



HEATHEN ENGLAND 77 

and so have retained their character for sanctity 
ahnost to our own time. 

Thunor, the same word as our modern EngHsh 
thunder, was practically, though not philologically, 
the Anglo-Saxon representative of Zeus. We are 
more familiar with his name in its clipped Norse 
form of Thor. Thursday is Thunor's day (Thunres 
dseg : dies Jovis) and the thunderbolt, really a 
polished stone axe of the aboriginal neolithic savages, 
was supposed to be his weapon. Thundersfield, in 
Surrey ; Thundersley. in Essex ; and Thursley, in 
Surrey, still preserve the memory of his sacred sites. 
Thurleigh, in Bedford ; Thurlow, in Essex ; Thursley, 
in Cumberland ; Thursfield, in Staffordshire ; and 
Thursford, in Norfolk, are more probably due to 
later Danish influence, and commemorate namesakes 
of the Norse Thor rather than the English Thunor. 

Tiw, the philological equivalent of Zeus, answered 
rather in character to Ares, and had for his day 
Tuesday (dies Martis). Tiw's mere and Tiw's thorn 
occur in charters, and a few places still retain his 
name. Frea gives his title to Friday (dies Veneris), 
and Sagtere to Saturday (dies Saturni). But the 
Anglo-Saxon worship really paid more attention to 
certain deified heroes, — Bseldaeg, Geat, and Sceaf; 
and to certain personified abstractions, — Wig (war). 
Death, and Sige (victory), than to these minor gods. 
And, as often happens in Polytheistic religions, there 
is reason to believe that the popular creed had much 
less reference to the gods at all than to many inferior 
spirits of a naturalistic sort. For the early English 



78 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

farmer, the world around was full of spiritual beings, 
half divine, half devilish. Fiends and monsters 
peopled the fens, and tales of their doings terrified 
his childhood. Spirits of flood and fell swamped his 
boat or misled him at night. Water nicors haunted 
the streams ; fairies danced on the green rings of the 
pasture ; dwarfs lived in the barrows of Celtic or 
neolithic chieftains, and wrought strange weapons 
underground. The mark, the forest, the hills, were 
all full for the early EngUshman of mysterious and 
often hostile beings. At length the Weirds or Fates 
swept him away. Beneath the earth itself, Hel, 
mistress of the cold and joyless world of shades, at 
last received him; unless, indeed, by dying a warrior's 
death, he was admitted to the happy realms of 
Wselheal. As a whole, the Anglo-Saxon heathendom 
was a religion of terrorism. Evil spirits surrounded 
men on every side, dwelt in all solitary places, and 
stalked over the land by night. Ghosts dv/elt in the 
forest ; elves haunted the rude stone circles of elder 
days. The woodland, still really tenanted by deer, 
w^olves, and wild boars, was also filled by popular 
imagination with demons and imps. Charms, spells, 
and incantations formed the most real and living 
part of the national faith; and many of these survived 
into Christian times as witchcraft. Some of them, 
and of the early myths, even continue to be re- 
peated in the folk-lore of the present day. Such 
are the legends of the Wild Huntsman and of 
Wayland Smith. Indeed, heathendom had a strong 
hold over the common English mind long after the 



HEATHEN ENGLAND. 79 

public adoption of Christianity; and heathen sacrifices 
continued to be offered in secret as late as the 
thirteenth century. Our poetry and our ordinary 
language is tinged with heathen ideas even in modern 
times. 

Still more interesting, however, are those relics of 
yet earlier social states, which we find amongst the 
Anglo-Saxons themselves. The production of fire by 
rubbing together two sticks is a common practice 
amongst all savages; and it has acquired a sacred 
significance which causes it to live on into more civil- 
ised stages. Once a year the needfire was so lighted, 
and all the hearths of the village were rekindled from 
the blaze thus obtained. Cattle were "passed through 
the fire " to preserve them from the attacks of fiends ; 
and perhaps even children were sometimes treated in 
the same manner. The ceremony, originally adopted, 
perhaps, by the English from their Celtic serfs, still 
lingers in remote parts of the country, as the lighting of 
fires on St. John's Eve. Tattooing the face was prac- 
tised by the noble classes. It seems probable that the 
early English sacrificed human victims, as the Germans 
certainly did to Wuotan (the High Dutch Woden) ; 
and we know that the practice of suttee existed, and 
that widows slew themselves on the death of their 
husbands, in order to accompany them to the other 
world. Even more curious are the vestiges of Tot- 
emism, or primitive animal worship, common to all 
branches of the Aryan race, as well as to the North 
American Indians, the Australian black fellows, and 
many other savages. Totemism consists in the belief 



8o ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

that each family is literally descended from a par- 
ticular plant or animal, whose name it bears ; and 
members of the family generally refuse to pluck the 
plant or kill the animal after which they are named. Of 
these beliefs we find apparently several traces in Anglo- 
Saxon life. The genealogies of the kings include such 
names as those of the horse, the mare, the ash, and 
the whale. In the very early Anglo-Saxon poem of 
Beowulf, two of the characters bear the names of 
Wulf and Eofer (boar). The wolf and the raven were 
sacred animals, and have left their memory in many 
places, as well as in such personal titles as ^thelwulf, 
the noble wolf The boar was also greatly reverenced ; 
its head was used as an amulet, or as a crest for 
helmets, and oaths were taken upon it till late in the 
middle ages. Our own boar's head at Christmas is a 
relic of the old belief. The sanctity of the horse and 
the ash has been already mentioned. Now many of 
the Anglo-Saxon clans bore names implying their 
descent from such plants or animals. Thus a charter 
mentions the ^Escings, or sons of the ash, in Surrey ; 
another refers to the Earnings, or sons of the eagle 
(earn) ; a third to the Heartings, or sons of the hart ; 
a fourth to the Wylfings, or sons of the wolf; and a 
fifth to the Thornings, or sons of the thorn. The oak 
has left traces of his descendants at Oakington, in 
Cambridge : the birch, at Birchington, in Kent ; the 
boar (Eofer) at Evringham, in Yorkshire ; the hawk, 
at Hawkinge, in Kent ; the horse, at Horsington, in 
Lincolnshire; the raven, at Raveningham, in Norfolk; 
the sun, at Sunning, in Berks ; and the serpent (Wyrm), 



HEATHEN ENGLAND. 8 1 

,it Wormingford, Worminghall, and Wormington, in 
Essex, Bucks, and Gloucester, respectively. Every 
one of these objects is a common and well-known 
totem amongst savage tribes ; and the inference that 
at some earlier period the Anglo-Saxons had been 
Totemists is almost irresistible. 

Moreover, it is an ascertained fact that the custom 
of exogamy (marriage by capture outside the tribe), 
and of counting kindred on the female side alone, 
accompanies the low stage of culture with which 
Totemism is usually associated. We know also that 
this method of reckoning relationship obtained 
amongst certain Aryan tribes, such as the Picts. 
Traces of the ceremonial form of marriage by capture 
survived in England to a late date in the middle ages ; 
and therefore the custom of exogamy, upon which 
the ceremony is based, must probably have existed 
amongst the English themselves at some earlier 
period. Even in the first historical age, a conquered 
king generally gave his daughter in marriage to his 
conqueror, as a mark of submission, which is a rehc 
of the same custom. Now, if members of the various 
tribes — Jutes, English, and Saxons, — used at one time 
habitually to intermarry with one another, and to 
give their children the clan-name of the father, it 
would follow that persons bearing the same clan- 
name would appear in ail the tribes. Such we find 
to be actually the case. The Hemings, for instance, 
are met with in six counties — York, Lincoln, Hunt- 
ingdon, Suffolk, Northampton, and Somerset; the 
Mannings occur in English Norfolk and in Saxon 

G 



82 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN 

Dorset ; the Billings, and many other clans, have left 
their names over the whole land, from north to south 
and from east to west alike. It has often been 
assumed that these facts prove the intimate intermix- 
ture of the invading tribes; but the supposition of 
the former existence of exogamy, and consequent 
appearance of similar clan-names in all the tribes, 
seems far more probable than such an extreme 
mingling of different tribesmen over the v/hole con- 
quered territory.^ Part of the early English ceremony 
of marriage consisted in the bridegroom touching the 
head of the bride with a shoe, a relic, doubtless, of 
the original mode of capture, when the captor placed 
his foot on the neck of his prisoner or slave. After 
marriage, the wife's hair was cut short, which is a 
universal mark of slavery. 

Thus we may divide the early English religion 
into four elements. First, the remnants of a very 
primitive savage faith, represented by the sanctity 
of animals and plants, by Totem.ism, by the need- 
fire, and by the use of amulets, charms, and spells. 
Second, the relics of the old common Aryan nature- 
worship, found in the reverence paid to Thunor, or 
Thunder, who is a form of Zeus, and in the sacred- 
ness of hills, rivers, wells, fords, and the open air. 
Third, a system of Teutonic hero or ancestor-worship, 

' I owe this ingenious explanation to a note in Mr. Andrew 
Lang's essays prefixed to Mr. Bolland's translation of Aristotle's 
Politics. He has there also suggested the analysis of the clan 
names for traces of Totemism,^, whose results T have given above 
in part. 



HEATHEN ENGLAND. 83 

typified by Woden, Baeldaeg, and the other great 
names of the genealogies, and having its origin in the 
belief in ghosts. Fourth, a deification of certain 
abstract ideas, such as War, Fate, Victory, and Death. 
But the average heathen Anglo-Saxon religion was 
merely a vast mass of superstition, a dark and gloomy 
terrorism, begotten of the vague dread of misfortune 
which barbarians naturally feel in a half-peopled land, 
where war and massacre are the highest business of 
every man's lifetime, and a violent death the ordinary 
«ray in which he meets his end. 



Q 2 



84 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. 

It was impossible that a country lying within sight 
of the orthodox Frankish kingdom, and enclosed 
between two Christian Churches on either side, should 
long remain in such a state of isolated heathendom. 
For to be cut off from Christendom was to be cut off 
from the whole social, political, intellectual, and com- 
mercial life of the civilised world. In Britain, as 
distinctly as in the Pacific Islands in our own day, the 
missionary was the pioneer of civilisation. The 
change which Christianity wrought in England in a 
few generations was almost as enormous as the 
change which it has wrought in Hawaii at the present 
time. Before the arrival of the missionary, there 
was no written literature, no industrial arts, no 
peace, no social intercourse between district and 
district. The church came as a teacher and civiliser, 
and in a few years the barbarous heathen English 
warrior had settled down into a toilsome agricul- 
turist, an eager scholar, a peaceful law-giver, or an 
earnest priest. The change was not merely a change 
of religion, it was a revolution from a life of barbarism 
to a life of incipient culture, and slow but progressive 
civilisation. 



THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. 85 

So inevitable was the Christianisation of England, 
that even while the flood of paganism was pouring 
westward, the east was beginning to receive the faith 
of Rome from the Frankish kingdom and from Italy. 
It has been necessary, indeed, to anticipate a little, 
in order to show the story of the conquest in its true 
light. Ten years before the heathen ^thelfrith of 
Northumbria massacred the Welsh monks at Chester 
Augustine had brought Christianity to the people of 
Kent. 

In 596, Gregory the Great determined to send a 
mission to England. Even before that time, Kent 
had been in closer union with the Continent than 
any other part of the country. Trade went on with 
the kindred Saxon coast of the Frankish kingdom, 
and ^thelberht, the ambitious Kentish king, and 
over-lord of all England south of the Humber,had even 
married Bercta, a daughter of the Frankish king of 
Paris. Bercta was of course a Christian, and she 
brought her own Frankish chaplain, who officiated in 
the old Roman church of St. Martin, at Canterbury. 
But Gregory's mission was on a far larger scale. Au- 
gustine, prior of the monastery on theCoelian Hill, was 
sent with forty monks to convert the heathen English. 
They landed in Thanet, in 597, with all the pomp of 
Roman civilisation and ecclesiastical symbolism. 
Gregory had rightly determined to try by ritual and 
show to impress the barbarian mind, ^thelberht, 
already predisposed to accept the Continental culture, 
and to assimilate his rude kingdom to the Roman 
model, met them in the open air at a solemn meeting • 



86 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

for he feared, says Baeda, to meet them withm four 
walls, lest they should practice incantations upon 
him. The foreign monks advanced in procession to 
the king's presence, chanting their litanies, aid dis- 
playing a silver cross. yEthelberht yielded almost at 
once. He and all his court became Christians ; and 
the people, as is usual amongst barbarous tribes, 
quickly conformed to the faith of their rulers, 
^thelberht gave the missionaries leave to build new 
churches, or to repair the old ones erected by the 
Welsh Christians. Augustine returned to Gaul, where 
he was consecrated as Archbishop of the English 
nation, at Aries. Kent became thenceforth a part of 
the great Continental system. Canterbury has ever 
since remained the metropolis of the English Church ; 
and the modern archbishops trace back their suc- 
cession directly to St. Augustine. 

For awhile, the young Church Seemed to make 
vigorous progress. Augustine built a monastery at 
Canterbury, where ^thelberht founded a new church 
to SS. Peter and Paul, to be a sort of Westminster 
Abbey for the tombs of all future Kentish kings and 
archbishops. He also restored an old Roman church 
in the city. The pope sent him sacramental vessels 
altar cloths, ornaments, relics, and, above all, many 
books. Ten years later, Augustine enlarged his mis- 
sionary field by ordaining two new bishops — Mellitus, 
to preach to the East Saxons, "whose metropolis," 
says Bseda, "is the city of London, which is the 
mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and 
land;" and Justus to the episcopal see of West 



THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. 87 

Kent, with his bishop-stool at Rochester. The East 
Saxons nominally accepted the faith at the bidding of 
their over-lord, ^Ethelberht ; but the people of Lon- 
don long remained pagans at heart. On Augustine's 
death, however, all life seemed again to die out of 
the struggling mission. Laurentius, who succeeded 
him, found the labour too great for his weaker hands. 
In 613 ^thelberht died, and his son Eadbald at once 
apostatised, returning to the worship of Woden and 
the ancestral gods. The East Saxons drove out 
Mellitus, who, with Justus, retired to Gaul ; and 
Archbishop Laurentius himself was minded to follow 
them. Then the Kentish king, admonished by a 
dream of the archbishop's, made submission, recalled 
the truant bishops, and restored Justus to Rochester. 
The Londoners, however, would not receive back 
Mellitus, " choosing rather to be under their idol- 
atrous high-priests." Soon Laurentius died too, and 
Mellitus was called to take his place, and consecrated 
at last a church in London in the monastery of St. 
Peter. In 624, the third archbishop was carried off 
by gout, and Justus of Rochester succeeded to the 
primacy of the struggling church. Up to this point 
little had been gained, except the conversion of Kent 
itself, with its dependent kingdom of Essex — the two 
parts of England in closest union with the Continent, 
through the mercantile intercourse by way of London 
and Richborough. 

Under the new primate, however, an unexpected 
opening occurred for the conversion of the North. 
The Northumbrian kings had now risen to the firs^ 



88 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

place in Britain, ^thelfrith had done much to 
establish their supremacy ; under Eadwine it rose to 
a height of acknowledged overlordship. " As an 
earnest of this king's future conversion and translation 
to the kingdom of heaven," says Baeda, with pardon- 
able Northumbrian patriotic pride, "even his tem- 
poral power was allowed to increase greatly, so that 
he did what no Englishman had done before — that is 
to say, he united under his own overlordship all the 
provinces of Britain, whether inhabited by English or 
by Welsh." Eadwine now took in marriage .^thel- 
burh, daughter of JEthelberht, and sister of the reign 
ing Kentish king. Justus seized the opportunity to 
introduce the Church into Northumbria. He or- 
dained one Paulinus as bishop, to accompany the 
Christian lady, to watch over her faith, and if possible 
to convert her husband and his people. 

Gregory had planned his scheme with systematic 
completeness ; he had decided that there should be 
two metropolitan provinces, of York and London 
(which he knew as the old Roman capitals of Britain), 
and that each should consist of twelve episcopal sees. 
Paulinus now went to York in furtherance of this 
comprehensive but abortive scheme. A miraculous 
escape from assassination, or what was reputed one, 
gave the Roman monk a hold over Eadwine's mind ; 
but the king decided to put off his conversion till he 
had tried the efficacy of the new faith by a practical 
appeal. He went on an expedition against the 
treacherous king of the West Saxons, who had en- 
deavoured to assassinate him, and determined to 



THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. 89 

abide by the result. Having overthrown his enemy 
with great slaughter, he returned to his royal city of 
Coningsborough (the king's town), and put himself as 
a catechumen under the care of Paulinus. The pope 
himself was induced to interest himself in so promis- 
ing a convert; and he wrote a couple of briefs to 
Eadwine and his queen. These letters, the originals 
of which were carefully preserved at Rome, are 
copied out in full by Baeda. No doubt, the honour 
of receiving such an epistle from the pontiff of the 
Eternal City was not without its effect upon the semi- 
barbaric mind of Eadwine, who seems in some 
respects to have inherited the old Roman traditions 
of Eboracum. 

Still the king held back. To change his own faith 
was to change the faith of the whole nation, and he 
thought it well to consult his witan. The old English 
assembly was always aristocratic in character, despite 
its ostensible democracy, for it consisted only of the 
heads of families ; and as the kingdoms grew larger, 
their aristocratic character necessarily became more 
pronounced, as only the wealthier persons could be 
in attendance upon the king. The folk-moot had 
grown into the witena-gemot, or assembly of wise 
men. Eadwine assembled such a meeting on the 
banks of the Derwent — for moots were always held 
in the open air at some sacred spot — and there the 
priests and thegns declared their willingness to accept 
the new religion. Coifi, chief priest of the heathen 
gods, himself led the way, and flung a lance in derision 
at the temple of his own deities. To the surprise of 



90 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

all, the gods did not avenge the insult. Thereupon 
" King ^duin, with all the nobles and most of the 
common folk of his nation, received the faith and 
the font of holy regeneration, in the eleventh year of 
his reign, which is the year of our Lord's incarnation 
the six hundred and twenty-seventh, and about the 
hundred and eightieth after the arrival of the English 
in Britain. He was baptized at York on Easter-day, 
the first before the Ides of April (April 12), in the 
church of St. Peter the Apostle, which he hiraselt 
had hastily built of wood, while he was being cate- 
chised and prepared for Baptism ; and in the same 
city he gave the bishopric to his prelate and sponsor 
Paulinus. But after his Baptism he took care, by 
Paulinus's direction, to build a larger and finer church 
of stone, in the midst whereof his original chapel 
should be enclosed." To this day, York Minster, the 
lineal descendant of Eadwine's wooden church, re- 
mains dedicated to St. Peter ; and the archbishops 
still sit in the bishop-stool of Paulinus. Part of 
Eadwine's later stone cathedral was discovered under 
the existing choir during the repairs rendered neces- 
sary by the incendiary Martin. As to the heathen 
temple, its traces still remained even in Baeda's day. 
"That place, formerly the abode of idols, is now 
pointed out not far from York to the westward, 
beyond the river Dornuentio, and is to-day called 
Godmundingaham, where the priest himself, through 
the inspiration of the true God, polluted and destroyed 
the altars which he himself had consecrated." So 
close did Baeda live to these early heathen English 



THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH. 91 

times. From the date of St. Augustine's arrival, 
indeed, Baeda stands upon the surer ground of almost 
contemporary narrative. 

Still the greater part of English Britain remained 
heathen. Kent, Essex, and Northumbria were con- 
verted, or at least their kings and nobles had been 
baptised : but East Anglia, Mercia, Sussex, Wessex, 
and the minor interior principalities were as yet 
wholly heathen. Indeed, the various Teutonic colo- 
nies seemed to have received Christianity in the 
exact order of their settlement : the older and more 
civilised first, the newer and ruder last. Paulinus, 
however, made another conquest for the church in 
Lindsey (Lincolnshire), "where the first who be- 
lieved," says the Chronicle, " was a certain great 
man who hight Blecca, with all his clan." In the 
very same year with these successes, Justus died, and 
Honoriu", received the See of Canterbury from Pau- 
linus at Uie old Roman city of Lincoln. So far the 
Roman missionaries remained the only Christian 
teachers in England : no English convert seems as 
yet to have taken holy orders. 

Again, however, the church received a severe 
check. Mercia, the youngest and roughest princi- 
pality, stood out for heathendom. The western 
colony was beginning to raise itself into a great 
power, under its fierce and strong old king Penda, 
who seems to have consolidated all the petty chief- 
tainships of the Midlands into a single fairly coherent 
kingdom. Penda hated Northumbria, which, under 
Eadwine, had made itself the chief English state : 



92 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

and he also hated Christianity, which he knew only 
as a religion fit for Welsh slaves, not for English 
warriors. For twenty-two years, therefore, the old 
heathen king waged an untiring war against Christian 
Northumbria. In 633, he allied himself with Cad- 
walla, the Christian Welsh king of Gwynedd, or 
North Wales, in a war against Eadwine ; an alliance 
which supplies one more proof that the gulf between 
Welsh and English was not so wide as it is sometimes 
represented to be. The Welsh and Mercian host 
met the Northumbrians at Heathfield (perhaps Hat- 
field Chase) and utterly destroyed them. Eadwine 
himself and his son Osfrith were slain. Penda and 
Cadwalla " fared thence, and undid all Northumbria." 
The country was once more divided into Deira and 
Bernicia, and two heathen rulers succeeded to the 
northern kingdom. Paulinus, taking ^thelburh, the 
widow of Eadwine, went by sea to Kent, where 
Honorius, whom he had himself consecrated, re- 
ceived him cordially, and gave him the vacant see 
of Rochester. There he remained till his death, and 
so for a time ended the Christian mission to York. 
Penda made the best of his victory by annexing the 
Southumbrians, the Middle English, and the Eindis- 
waras, as well as by conquering the Severn Valley 
from the West Saxons. Henceforth, Mercia stands 
forth as one of the three 'eading Teutonic states in 
Britain. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 93 



CHAPTER X. 

ROME AND I ON A. 

It was not the Roman mission which finally suc- 
ceeded in converting the North and the Midlands. 
That success w^as due to the Scottish and Pictish 
Church. At the end of the sixth century, Columba, 
an Irish missionary, crossed over to the solitary rock 
of lona, where he established an abbey on the Irish 
model, and quickly evangelised the northern Picts. 
From lona, some generations later, went forth the 
devoted missionaries who finally converted the 
northern half of England. 

Tiie native cnurches of the west, cut off from 
direct intercourse with the main body of Latin 
Christendom, had retained certain habits which were 
now regarded by Rome as schismatical. Chief 
among these were the date of celebrating Easter, 
and the uncanonical method of cutting the tonsure 
in a crescent instead of a circle. x\ugustine, shortly 
after his arrival, endeavoured to obtain unity between 
the two churches on these matters of discipline, to 
which great importance was attached as tests of sub- 
mission to the Latin rule. He obtained from ^thel- 
berht a safe-conduct through the heathen West- 
Saxon territories as far as what is now Worcester- 
shire ; and there, *'on the borders of the Huiccii 



94 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

and the West-Saxons," says Baeda, " he convened to 
a colloquy the bishops and doctors of the nearest 
province of the Britons, in the place which, to the 
present day, is called in the English language, Augus- 
tine's Oak." Such open-air meetings by sacred trees 
or stones were universal in England both before and 
after its conversion. " He began to admonish them 
with a brotherly admonition to embrace with him the 
Catholic faith, and to undertake the common task of 
evangelising the pagans. For they did not observe 
Easter at the proper period : moreover, they did 
many other things contrary to the unity of the 
Church." But the Welsh were jealous of the intru- 
ders, and refused to abandon their old customs. 
Thereupon, Augustine declared that if they would 
not help him against the heathen, they would perish 
by the heathen. A few years later, after Augustine's 
death, this prediction was verified by ^thelfrith of 
Northurnbria, whose massacre of the monks of Bangor 
has already been noticed. 

It was in return for the destruction of Chester and 
the slaughter of the monks that Cadwalla joined the 
heathen Penda against his fellow Christian Eadwine. 
But the death of Eadwine left the throne open for 
the house of yEthelfrith, whose place Eadwine had 
taken. After a year of renewed heathendom, how- 
ever, during part of which the Welsh Cadwalla reigned 
over Northumbria, Oswald, son of ^thelfrith, again 
united Deira and Bernicia under his own rule. Oswald 
was a Christian, but he had learnt his Christianity 
from the Scots, amongst whom he bad spent his exile, 



ROME AND lONA. 95 

and he favoured the introduction of Pictish and 
Scottish missionaries into Northumbria. The Italian 
monks who had accompanied Augustine were men of 
foreign speech and marmers, representatives of an 
ahen civiHsation, and they attempted to convert 
whole kingdoms en bloc by the previous conversion 
of their rulers. Their method was political and 
systematic. But the Pictish and Irish preachers were 
men of more Britannic feelings, and they went to 
work with true missionary earnestness to convert the 
half Celtic people of Northumbria, man by man, in 
their own homes. Aidan, the apostle of the north, 
carried the Pictish faith into the Lothians and Nor- 
thumberland. He placed his bishop-stool not far 
from the royal town of Bamborough, at Lindisfarne, 
the Holy Island of the Northumbrian coast. Other 
Celtic missionaries penetrated further south, even 
into the heathen realm of Penda and his tributary 
princes. Ceadda or Chad, the patron saint of Lich- 
field, carried Christianity to the Mercians. Diuma 
preached to the Middle English of Leicester with 
much success, Peada, their ealdorman, son of Penda, 
having himself already embraced the new faitlx Penda 
had slain Oswald in a great battle at Maserfeld in 
641 ; but the martyr only brought increased glory 
to the Christians : and Oswiu, who succeeded him, 
after an interval of anarchy, as king of Deira (for 
Bernicia now chose a king of its own), was also a 
zealous adherent of the Celtic missionaries. Thus the 
heterodox Church made rapid strides throughout 
the whole of the north. 



96 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Meanwhile, in the south the Latin missionaries, 
urged to activity, perhaps, by the Pictish successes, 
had been making fresh progress. In the very year 
when Oswald was chosen king by the Northumbrians, 
Birinus, a priest from northern Italy, went by com- 
mand of the pope to the West Saxons : and after 
twelve months- he was able to baptise their king, 
Cynegils, at his capital of Dorchester, on the Thames, 
his sponsor being Oswald of Northumbria. A year 
later, FeHx, a Burgundian, "preached the faith of 
Christ to the East Anglians," who had indeed been 
converted by the Augustinian missionaries, but 
afterwards relapsed. Only Sussex and Mercia still 
remained heathen. But, in 655, Penda made a last 
attempt against Northumbria, which he had harried 
year after year, and was met by Oswiu at Winwidfield, 
near Leeds ; the Christians were successful, and 
Penda was slain, together with thirty royal persons — 
petty princes of the tributary Mercian states, no 
doubt. His son, Peada, the Christian ealdorman of 
the Middle English, succeeded him, and the Mer- 
cians became Christians of the Pictish or Irish type. 
" Their first bishop," says Baeda, " was Diuma, v/ho 
died and w^as buried among the Middle English. The 
second was Cellach, who abandoned his bishopric, 
and returned during his lifetime to Scotland (perhaps 
Ireland, but more probably the Scottish king- 
dom in Argyllshire). Both of these were by birth 
Irishmen. The third was Trumhere, by race an 
Englishman, but educated and ordained by the Irish, " 
Thus Roman Christianity spread over the whole of 



ROME AND lONA. 97 

England south of the Wash (save only heathen Sus- 
sex) : while the Irish Church had made its way over 
all the north, from the Wash to the Frith of Forth. 
The Roman influence may be partly traced by the 
Roman alphabet superseding the old English runes. 
Runic inscriptions are rare in the south, where they 
were regarded as heathenish relics, and so destroyed : 
but they are comparatively common in the north. 
Runics appear on the coins of the first Christian 
kings of Mercia, Peada and ^thelred, but soon die 
out under their successors. 

Heathendom was now fairly vanquished. It sur- 
vived only in Sussex, cut off from the rest of England 
by the forest belt of the Weald. The next trial of 
strength must clearly lie between Rome and lona. 

The northern bishops and abbots traced their suc- 
cession, not to Augustine, but to Columba. Cuth- 
berht, the English apostle of the north, who really 
converted the people of Northumbria, as earlier mis- 
sionaries had converted its kings, derived his orders 
from lona. Rome or Ireland, was now the practical 
question of the English Church. As might be 
expected, Rome conquered. To allay the discord, 
King Oswiu summoned a synod at Streoneshalch 
(now known by its later Danish name of Whitby) in 
664, to settle the vexed question as to the date of 
Easter. The Irish priests claimed the authority of 
St. John for their crescent tonsure ; the Romans, 
headed by Wilfrith, a most vigorous priest, appealed 
to the authority of St. Peter for the canonical circle. 
" I will never offend the saint who holds the keys of 

H 



98 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

heaven," said Oswiu, with the frank, half-heathendom 
of a recent convert; and the meeting shortly de- 
cided as the king would have it. The Irish party 
acquiesced or else returned to Scotland ; and thence- 
forth the new English Church remained in close com- 
munion with Rome and the Continent. Whatever 
may be our ecclesiastical judgment of this decision, 
there can be little doubt that its material effects were 
most excellent. By bringing England into connection 
with Rome, it brought her into connection with the 
centre of all then-existing civilisation, and endowed her 
with arts and manufactures which she could never 
otherwise have attained. The connection with Ireland 
and the north would have been as fatal, from a purely 
secular point of view, to early English culture as was 
the later connection with half-barbaric Scandinavia. 
Rome gave England the Roman letters, arts, and 
organisation : Ireland could only have given her a 
more insular form of Celtic civilisation. 



ANGLO SAXON BRITAIN. 99 



CHAPTER XI. 

CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. . 

The change wrought in England by the introduc- 
tion of the new faith was immense and sudden at the 
moment, as well as deep-reaching in its after conse- 
quences. The isolated heathen barbaric communities 
became at once an integral part of the great Roman 
and Christian civilisation. Even before the arrival 
of Augustine, some slight tincture of Roman influence 
had filtered through into the English world. The 
Welsh serfs had preserved some traditional knowledge 
of Roman agriculture ; Kent had kept up some inter- 
course with the Continent ; and even in York, 
Eadwine affected a certain imitation of Roman pomp. 
But after the introduction of Christianity, Roman 
civilisation began to produce marked results over the 
whole country. Writing, before almost unknown, or 
confined to the engraving of runic characters on 
metal objects, grew rapidly into a common art. The 
Latin language was introduced, and with it the key 
to the Latin literature and Latin science, the heir- 
looms of Greece and the East. Roman influences 
affected the little courts of the English kings ; and the 
customary laws began to be written down in regular 
codes. Before the conversion we have not a single 

H -L 



lOO ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

written document upon which to base our history; from 
the moment of Augustine's landing we have the invalu- 
able works of Bseda, and a host of lesser writings 
(chiefly lives of saints), besides an immense number of 
charters or royal grants of land to monasteries and pri- 
vate persons. These grants, written at first in Latin, but 
afterwards in Anglo-Saxon, were preserved in the mon- 
asteries down to the date of their dissolution, and then 
became the property of various collectors. They have 
been transcribed and published by Mr. Kemble and 
Mr. Thorpe, and they form some of our most useful 
materials for the early history of Christian England. 
It was mainly by means of the monasteries that 
Christianity became a great civilising and teaching 
agency in England. Those who judge monastic 
institutions only by their later and worst days, when 
they had, perhaps, ceased to perform any useful 
function, are apt to forget the benefits which they 
conferred upon the people in the earUer stages of 
their existence. The state of England during this 
first Christian period was one of chronic and bloody 
warfare. There was no regular army, but every free- 
man was a soldier, and raids of one English tribe 
upon another were everyday occurrences; while 
pillaging frays on the part of the Welsh, followed by 
savage reprisals on the part of the English, were still 
more frequent. During the heathen period, even the 
Picts seem often to have made piractical expeditions 
far into the south of England. In 597, for example, 
we read in the Chronicle that Ceolwulf, king of the 
West Saxons, constantly fought "either against the 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. lOI 

English, or against the Welsh, or against the Picts." 
But in 603, the Argyllshire Scots made a raid against 
Northumbria, and were so completely crushed by 
^thelfrith, that "since then no king of Scots durst 
lead a host against this folk " ; while the southern 
Picts of Galloway became tributaries of the Northum- 
brian kings. But war between Saxons and English, 
or between Teutons and Welsh, still remained 
chronic ; and Christianity did little to prevent these 
perpetual border wars and raids. In 633, Cad walla 
and Penda wasted Northumbria; in 644, Penda 
drove out King Kenwealh, of the West Saxons^ from 
his possessions along the Severn; in 671, Wulfhere, 
the Mercian, ravaged Wessex and the south as far as 
Ashdown, and conquered Wight, which he gave to the 
South Saxons ; and so, from time to time, we catch 
ghmpses of the unceasing strife between each folk and 
its neighbours, besides many hints of intestine struggles 
between prince and prince, or of rivalries between 
one petty shire and others of the same kingdom, far too 
numerous and unimportant to be detailed here in full. 
With such a state of affairs as this, it became a 
matter of deep importance that there should be some 
one institution where the arts of peace might be car- 
ried on in safety ; where agriculture might be sure of 
its reward ; where literature and science might be 
studied ; and where civjjising influences might be 
safe from interruption or rapine. The monasteries 
gave an opportunity for such an ameliorating in- 
fluence to spring up. They were spared even in war 
by the reverence of the people for the Church ; and 



102 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

they became places where peaceful minds might retire 
for honest work, and learning, and thinking, away 
from the fierce turmoil of a still essentially barbaric 
and predatory community. At the same time, they 
encouraged the development of this very type of 
mind by turning the reproach of cowardice, which it 
would have carried with it in heathen times, into an 
honour and a mark of holiness. Every monastery 
became a centre of light and of struggling culture 
for the surrounding district. They were at once, to 
the early English recluse, universities and refuges, 
places of education, of retirement, and of peace, in 
the midst of a jarring and discordant world. 

Hence, almost the first act of every newly-con- 
verted prince was to found a monastery in his 
dominions. That of Canterbury dates from the ar- 
rival of Augustine. In 643, Kenwealh of Wessex 
" bade timber the old minster at Winchester." In 
654, shordy after the conversion of East Anglia, 
" Botulf began to build a monastery at Icanho," 
since called after his name Botulf's tun, or Boston. 
In 657, Peada of Mercia and Oswiu of NorthumBria 
" said that they would rear a monastery to the glory 
of Christ and the honour of St. Peter ; and they did 
so, and gave it- the name of Medeshamstede " ; but 
it is now known as Peterborough.^ 

Before the battle of Winwidfield, Oswiu had vowed 
to build twelve minsters in his kingdom, and he re- 

' The charter is a late forgery, but there is no reason to 
doubt that it represents the correct tradition. 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. 1 03 

deemed his vow by founding six in Bernicia and six 
in Deira. In 669, Ecgberht of Kent " gave Reculver 
to Bass, the mass-priest, to build a monastery there- 
on." In 66^, ^thelthryth, a lady of royal blood, 
better known by the Latinised name of St. Ethel- 
dreda, "began the monastery at Ely." Before Baeda's 
death, in 735, religious houses already existed at 
Lastingham, Melrose, Lindisfarne, Whithern,Bardney, 
Gilling, Bury, Ripon, Chertsey, Barking, Abercorn, 
Selsey, Redbridge, Coldingham, Towcester, Hackness, 
and several other places. So the whole of England 
was soon covered with monastic establishments, each 
liberally endowed with land, and each engaged in 
tilling the soil without, and cultivating peaceful arts 
within, like little islands of southern civilisation, 
dotted about in the wide sea of Teutonic barbarism. 

In the Roman south, many, if not all, of the 
monasteries seem to have been planned on the 
regular models ; but in the north, where the Irish 
missionaries had borne the largest share in the work 
of conversion, the monasteries were irregular bodies 
on the Irish plan, where an abbot or abbess ruled 
over a mixed community of monks and nuns. 
Hild, a member of the Northumbrian princely family, 
founded such an abbey at Streoneshalch (Whitby), 
made memorable by numbering amongst its members 
the first known English poet, Csedmon. St. John of 
Beverley, Bishop of Hexham, set up a similar mon- 
astery at the place with which his name is so closely 
associated. The Irish monks themselves founded 
others at Lindisfarne and elsewhere. Even in the 



r04 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

south, some Irish abbeys existed. An Irish monk had 
set up one at Bosham, in Sussex, even before Wilfrith 
converted that kingdom ; and one of his country- 
men, Maidulf (or Maeldubh ?) was the original head 
of MahTiesbury. In process of time, however, as the 
union with Rome grew stronger, all these houses 
conformed to the more regular usage, and became 
monasteries of the ordinary Benedictine type. 

The civilising value of the monasteries can hardly 
be over-rated. Secure in the peace conferred upon 
them by a religious sanction, the monks became the 
builders of schools, the drainers of marshland, the 
clearers of forest, the tillers of heath. Many of the 
earliest religious houses rose in the midst of what had 
previously been trackless wilds. Peterborough and 
Ely grew up on islands of the Fen country. Crow- 
land gathered round the cell of Guthlac in the midst 
of a desolate mere. Evesham occupied a glade in the 
wild forests of the western march. Glastonbury, an 
old Welsh foundation, stood on a solitary islet, where 
the abrupt knoll of the Tor looks down upon the 
broad waste of the Somersetshire marshes. Beverley, 
as its name imports, had been a haunt of beavers 
before the monks began to till its fruitful dingles. In 
every case agriculture soon turned the wild lands into 
orchards and cornfields, or drove drains through the 
fens which converted their marshes into meadows and 
pastures for the long-horned English cattle. Roman 
architecture, too, came with the Roman church. We 
hear nothing before of stone buildings ; but Eadwine 
erected a church of stone at York, under the direction 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. I05 

of Paulinus ; and Bishop Wilfrith, a generation later, 
restored and decorated it, covering the roof with lead 
and filling the windows with panes of glass. Masons 
had already been settled in Kent, though Benedict, 
the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow, found it 
desirable to bring over others from the Franks. Metal- 
working had always been a special gift of the English, 
and their gold jewellery was well made even before 
the conversion, but it became still more noticeable 
after the monks took the craft into their own hands. 
■Bgeda mentions mines of copper, iron, lead, silver, and 
jet. Abbot Benedict not only brought manuscripts 
and pictures from Rome, which were copied and 
imitated in his monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, 
but he also brought over glass-blowers, who introduced 
the art of glass-making into England. Cuthberht, 
Baeda's scholar, writes to Lull, asking for workmen 
who can make glass vessels. Bells appear to have 
been equally early introductions. Roman music of 
course accompanied the Roman liturgy. The con- 
nection established with the clergy of the continent 
favoured the dispersion of European goods throughout 
England. We constantly hear of presents, consisting 
of skilled handicraft, passing from the civilised south 
to the rude and barbaric north. Wilfrith and Bene- 
dict journeyed several times to and from Rome, 
enlarging their own minds by intercourse with Roman 
society, and returning laden with works of art or 
manuscripts of value. Baeda was acquainted with the 
writings of all the chief classical poets and philosophers, 
whom he often quotes. We can only liken the results 



ro6 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

of such intercourse to those which in our own time 
have proceeded from the opening of Japan to western 
ideas, or of the Hawaiian Islands to European civiH- 
sation and European missionaries. The EngHsh 
school which soon sprang up at Rome, and the Latin 
schools which soon sprang up at York and Canterbury, 
are precise equivalents of the educational movements 
in both those countries which we see in our own day. 
The monks were to learn Latin and Greek " as well 
as they learned their own tongue," and were so to be 
given the key of all the literature and all the science 
that the world then possessed. 

The monasteries thus became real manufacturing, 
agricultural, and Uterary centres on a small scale. 
The monks boiled down the salt of the brine-pits ; 
they copied and illuminated manuscripts in the 
library; they painted pictures not without rude merit 
of their own ; they ran rhines through the marshy 
moorland ; they tilled the soil with vigour and suc- 
cess. A new culture began to occupy the land — the 
culture whose fully-developed form we now see around 
us. But it must never be forgotten that in its origin 
it is wholly Roman, and not at all Anglo-Saxon. Our 
people showed themselves singularly apt at embracing 
it, like the modern Polynesians, and unlike the 
American Indians ; but they did not invent it for them- 
selves. Our existing culture is not home-bred at all ; 
it is simply the inherited and widened culture of 
Greece and Italy. 

The most perfect picture of the monastic life and 
of early English Christianity which we possess is that 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. 107 

drawn for us in the life and Avorks of Baeda. Before 
giving any account, however, of the sketch which he 
has left us, it will be necessary to follow briefly the 
course of events in the English church during the 
few intervening years. 

The Church of England in its existing forni owes its 
organisation to a Greek monk. In 667, Oswiu of 
Northumbria and Ecgberht of Kent, in order to 
bring their dominions into closer connection with 
Rome, united in sending Wigheard the priest to the 
pope, that he might be hallowed Archbishop of Can- 
terbury. No Englishman had yet held that office, and 
the choice may be regarded as a symptom of growth 
in the native Church. But Wigheard died at Rome, 
and the pope seized the opportunity to consecrate an 
archbishop in the Roman interest. His choice fell 
upon one Theodore, a monk of Tarsus in Cilicia, 
who was in the orders of the Eastern church. The 
pope was particular, however, that Theodore should 
not " introduce anything contrary to the verity of the 
faith into the Church over which he was to preside." 
Theodore accepted Roman orders and the Roman 
tonsure, and set out for his province, where he arrived 
after various adventures on the way. His re-organi- 
sation of the young Church was thorough and system- 
atic. Originally England had been divided into 
seven great dioceses, corresponding to the principal 
kingdoms (save only still heathen Sussex), and having 
their sees in their chief towns — East and West Kent, 
at Canterbury and Rochester ; Essex, at London ; 
Wessex, at Dorchester or Winchester ; Northumbria, 



Io8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

at York ; East Anglia, at Dimwich ; and Mercia, at 
Lichfield. The Scottish bishopric of Lindisfarne 
coincided with Bernicia. Theodore divided these 
great dioceses into smaller ones ; East Anglia had 
two, for its north and south folk, atElmham andDun- 
wich ; Bernicia was divided between Lindisfarne and 
Hexham ; Lincolnshire had its see placed at Sidna- 
cester; arid the sub-kingdoms of Mercia were also made 
into dioceses, the Huiccii having their bishop-stool at 
Worcester; the Hecans, at Hereford; and the 
Middle English, at Leicester. But Theodore's great 
work was the establishment of the national synod, in 
which all the clergy of the various English kingdoms 
met together as a single people. This was the first 
step ever taken towards the unification of England ; 
and the ecclesiastical unity thus preceded and paved 
the way for the political unity which was to follow it. 
Theodore's organisation brought the whole Church 
into connection with Rome. The bishops owing their 
orders to the Scots conformed or withdrew, and hence- 
forward Rome held undisputed sway. Before Theo- 
dore, all the archbishops of Canterbury and all the 
bishops of the southern kingdoms had been Roman 
missionaries; those of the north had been Scots or 
in Scottish orders. After Theodore they were all 
Englishmen in Roman orders. The native church 
became thenceforward wholly self-supporting. 

Theodore was much aided in his projects by Wil- 
frith of York, a man of fiery energy and a devoted 
adherent of the Roman see, who had carried the Roman 
supremacy at the Synod of Whitby, and who spent a 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. I OQ 

large part of his time in journeys between England 
and Italy. His life, by ^Eddi, forms one of the most 
important documents for early English history. In 
68 1 he completed the conversion of England by his 
preaching to the South Saxons, whom he endeavoured 
to civilise as well as Christianise. His monastery 
of Selsey was built on land granted by the under- 
king (now a tributary of Wessex), and his first act 
was to emancipate the slaves whom he found upon 
the soil. Equally devoted to Rome was the young 
Northumbrian noble, who took the religious name of 
Benedict Biscop. Benedict became at first an inmate 
of the Abbey of Lerins, near Cannes. He afterwards 
founded two regular Benedictine abbeys on the same 
model at Wearmouthand Jarrow, and made at least four 
visits to the papal court, whence he returned laden 
with manuscripts to introduce Roman learning among 
his wild Northumbrian countrymen. He likewise 
carried over silk robes for sale to the kings in exchange 
for grants of land ; and he brought glaziers from Gaul 
for his churches. Jarrow alone contained 500 monks 
and possessed endowments of 15,000 acres. 

It was under the walls of Jarrow that Bseda himself 
was born, in the year 672. Only fifty years had 
passed since his native Northumbria was still a 
heathen land. Not more than forty years had gone 
since the conversion of Wessex, and Sussex was still 
given over to the worship of Thunor and Woden. 
But Bseda's own life was one which brought him 
wholly into connection with Christian teachers and 
Roman culture. Left an orphan at the age of seven 



no ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

years, he was handed over to the care of Abbot 
Benedict, after whose death Abbot Ceolfrid took 
charge of the young aspirant. " Thenceforth," says 
the aged monk, fifty years later, " I passed all my life- 
time in the building of that monastery [J arrow], and 
gave all my days to meditating on Scripture. In the 
intervals of my regular monastic discipline, and of my 
daily task of chanting in chapel, I have always amused 
myself either by learning, teaching, or writing. In 
the nineteenth year of my life I received ordination 
as deacon ; in my thirtieth year I attained to the 
priesthood; both functions being administered by 
the most reverend bishop John [afterwards known as 
St. John of Beverley], at the request of Abbot Ceol- 
frid. From the time of my ordination as priest to the 
fifty-ninth year of my life, I have occupied myself in 
briefly commenting upon Holy Scripture, for the 
use of myself and my brethren, from the works of 
the venerable fathers, and in some cases I have 
added interpretations of my own to aid in their 
comprehension." 

The variety of Bseda's works, the large knowledge 
of science and of classical literature which he dis- 
plays (when judged by the continental standard of the 
eigiith century), and his familiar acquaintance with 
the Latin language, which he writes easily and cor- 
rectly, show that the library of Jarrow must have been 
extensive and valuable. Besides his Scriptural com- 
mentaries, he wrote a treatise De Natura Reruniy 
Letters on the Reason of Leap- Year, a Life of St. 
Anastasius, and a History of his Own Abbey, all in 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. Ill 

Latin. In verse, he composed many pieces, both 
in hexameters and elegiacs, together with a treatise 
on prosody. But his greatest work is his '* Ecclesi- 
astical History of the English People," the authority 
from which we derive almost all our knowledge of 
early Christian England. It was doubtless sug- 
gested by the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours, 
and it consists of five books, divided into short 
chapters, making up about 400 pages of a modern 
octavo. Five manuscripts, one of them transcribed 
only two years after Baeda's death, and now deposited 
in the Cambridge library, preserve for us the text of 
this priceless document. The work itself should be 
read in the original, or in one of the many excellent 
translations, by every person who takes any intelligent 
interest in our early history. 

Baeda's accomplishments included even a know- 
ledge of Greek — then a rare acquisition in the west — 
which he probably derived from Archbishop Theodore's 
school at Canterbury. He was likewise an English 
author, for he translated the Gospel of St. John into 
his native Northumbrian ; and the task proved the 
last of his useful life. Several manuscripts have pre- 
served to us the letter of Cuthberht, afterwards Abbot 
of Jarrow, to his friend Cuthwine, giving us the very 
date of his death, May 27, a.d. 735, and also narrating 
the pathetic but somewhat overdrawn picture, with 
which we are all familiar, of how he died just as he 
had completed his translation of the last chapter 
" Thus saying, he passed the day in peace till even- 
tide. The boy [his scribe] said to him, ' Still one 



112 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

sentence, beloved master, is yet unwritten.' He 
answered, ' Write it quickly.' After a while the boy 
said, ' Now the sentence is written.' Then he replied, 
' It is well,' quoth he, ' thou hast said the truth : it is 
finished.' . . . And so he passed away to the 
kingdom of heaven." 

It is impossible to overrate the importance of the 
change which made such a life of earnest study and 
intellectual labour as Bseda's possible amongst the 
rough and barbaric English. Nor was it only in pro- 
ducing thinkers and readers from a people who could 
not spell a word half a century before, that the 
monastic system did* good to England. The monas- 
teries owned large tracts of land which they could 
cultivate on a co-operative plan, as cultivation was 
impossible elsewhere. Laborare est orare was the 
true monastic motto : and the documents of the 
religious houses, relating to lands and leases, show us 
the other or material side of the picture, which was not 
less important in its way than the spiritual and intel- 
lectual side. Everywhere the monks settled in the 
woodland by the rivers, cut down the forests, drove 
out the wolves and the beavers, cultivated the soil 
with the aid of their tenants and serfs, and became 
colonisers and civiHsers at the same time that they were 
teachers and preachers. The reclamation of waste 
land throughout the marshes of England was due 
almost entirely to the monastic bodies. 

The value of the civilising influence thus exerted 
is seen especially in the written laws, and it affected 
even the actions of the fierce English princes. The 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. II3 

dooms of ^thelberht of Kent are the earliest English 
documents which we possess, and they were reduced to 
writing shortly after the conversion of the first English 
Christian king : while Baeda expressly mentions that 
they were compiled after Roman models. The 
Church was not able to hold the warlike princes 
really in check ; but it imposed penances, and en- 
couraged many of them to make pilgrimages to Rome, 
and to end their days in a cloister. The importance 
of such pilgrimages was doubtless immense. They 
induced the rude insular nobility to pay a visit to 
what was still, after all, the most civilised country of 
the world, and so to gain some knowledge of a foreign 
culture, which they afterwards endeavoured to intro- 
duce into their own homes. In 688, Ceadwalla, the 
ferocious king of the West Saxons, whose brother 
Mul had been burnt alive by the men of Kent, and 
who harried the Jutish kingdom in return, and who 
also murdered two princes of Wight, with all their 
people, in cold blood, went on a pilgrimage to Rome, 
where he was baptised, and died immediately after. ^ 
Ine, who succeeded him, re-endowed the old British 
monastery of Glastonbury, in territory just conquered 
from the West Welsh, and reduced the laws of the 
West Saxons to writing. He, too, retired to Rome, 



' He was buried at St. Peter's, and his tomb still exists m 
the remodelled building. Baeda quotes the inscription in full, 
and quotes it correctly ; a fact which may be taken as an ex- 
cellent test of his historical accuracy, and the care with which 
he collected his materials. 

I 



114 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

where he died. In 704, ^theh'ed, son of Penda, 
king of the Mercians, "assumed monkhood." In 
709, Cenred, his successor, and Offa of Essex, went 
to Rome. And so on for many years, king after 
king resigned his kingship, and submitted, in his 
latter days, to the Church, Within two centuries, no 
less than thirty kings and queens are recorded to 
have embraced a conventual life : and far more pro- 
bably did so, but were passed over in silence. Bseda 
tells us that many Englishmen went into monasteries 
in Gaul. 

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that while 
Christianity made great progress, many marks of 
heathendom were still left among the people. Well- 
worship and stone-worship, devil-craft and sacrifices 
to idols, are mentioned in every Anglo-Saxon code of 
laws, and had to be provided against even as late as 
the time of Eadgar. The belief in elves and other 
semi-heathen beings, and the reverence for heathen 
memorials, was rife, and shows itself in such names 
as Alfred, elf-counsel ; ^Ifstan, elf-stone ; ^Ifgifu, 
elf-given ; ^thelstan, noble-stone ; and Wulfstan, 
wolf-stone. Heathendom was banished from high 
places, but it lingered on among the lower classes, 
and affected the nomenclature even of the later West 
Saxon kings themselves. Indeed, it was closely 
interwoven with all the life and thought of the people, 
and entered, in altered forms, even into the concep- 
tions of Christianity current amongst them. The 
Christian poem of Csedmon is tinctured on every 
page with ideas derived from the legends of llie old 



CHRISTIAN ENGLAND. I15 

heathen mythology. And it will probably surprise 
many to learn that even at this late date, tattooing 
continued to be practised by the English chief- 
tains. 



i i 



Il6 ANGLO-SAXON ERITAm. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOMS. 

With the final triumph of Christianity, all the forma- 
tive elements of Anglo-Saxon Britain are complete. 
We see it, a rough conglomeration of loosely-aggre- 
gated principalities, composed of a fighting aristocracy 
and a body of unvalued serfs; while interspersed 
through its parts are the bishops, monks, and clergy, 
centres of nascent civilisation for the seething mass 
of noble barbarism. The country is divided into 
agricultural colonies, and its only industry is agricul- 
ture, its only wealth, land. We want but one more 
conspicuous change to make it into the England of 
the Augustan Anglo-Saxon age— the reign of Eadgar 
— and that one change is the consolidation of the 
discordant kingdoms under a single loose overlord- 
ship. To understand this final step, we must glance 
briefly at the dull record of the political history. 

Under ^thelfrith, Eadwine, and Oswiu, North- 
umbria had been the chief power in England. But 
the eighth century is taken up with the greatness of 
Mercia. Ecgfrith, the last great king of Northumbria, 
whose over-lord shij) extended over the Picts of 
Galloway and the Cumbrians of Strathclyde, en- 
deavoured to carry his conquests beyond the Forth 



THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOMS. II7 

and annex the free land lying to the north of the old 
Roman line. He was defeated and slain, and with 
him fell the supremacy of Northumbria. Mercia, 
which already, under Penda and Wulfhere, had risen 
to the second place, now assumed the first position 
among the Teutonic kingdoms. Unfortunately we 
know little of the period of Mercian supremacy. The 
West Saxon chronicle contains few notices of the 
rival state, and we are thrown for information chiefly 
on the second-hand Latin historians of the twelfth 
century, ^thelbald, the first powerful Mercian king 
(716 — 755), "ravaged the land of the Northumbrians," 
and made Wessex acknowledge his supremacy. By 
this time all the minor kingdoms had practically 
become subject to the three great powers, though still 
retaining their native princes : and Wessex, Mercia, 
and Northumbria shared between them, as suzerains, 
the whole of Teutonic Britain. The meagre annals 
of the Chronicle, upon which alone (with the Charters 
and Latin writers of later date) we rest after the death 
of B?eda, show us a chaotic list of wars and battles 
between these three great powers themselves, or 
between them and their vassals, or with the Welsh 
and Devonians, ^thelbald was succeeded, after a 
short interval, by Offa, whose reign of nearly forty 
years (758 — 796), is the first settled period in English 
history. Offa ruled over the subject princes with 
rigour, and seems to have made his power really felt. 
He drove the Prince of Powys from Shrewsbury, and 
carried his ravages into the heart of Wales. He con- 
quered the land between the Severn and the Wye. 



Il8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

and his dyke from the Dee to the Severn, and the Wye, 
marked the new limits of the Welsh and English 
borders; while his laws codified the customs of 
Mercia, as those of ^thelberht and Ine had done with 
the customs of Kent and Wessex. He set up for 
awhile an archbishopric at Lichfield, which seems to 
mark his determination to erect Mercia into a sovereign 
power. He also founded the great monastery of St. 
Alban's, and is said to have established the English 
college at Rome, though another account attributes it to 
Ine, the West Saxon. East Anglia, Kent, Essex, and 
Sussex all acknowledged his supremacy. Karl the 
Great was then reviving the Roman Empire in its 
Germanic form, and Offa ventured to correspond with 
the Frank emperor as an equal. The possession of 
London, now a Mercian city, gave Offa an interest in 
continental affairs ; and the growth of trade is marked 
by the fact that when a quarrel arose between them, 
they formally closed the ports of their respective 
kingdoms against each other's subjects. 

Nevertheless, English kingship still remained a 
mere military ofiice, and consolidation, in our modern 
sense, was clearly impossible. Local j ealousies divided 
all the little kingdoms and their component princi- 
paHties ; and any real subordination was impracticable 
amongst a purely agricultural and warlike people, 
with no regular army, and governed only by their own 
anarchic desires. Like the Afghans of the present 
time, the early English were incapable of union, 
except in a temporary way under the strong hand of 
a single warlike leader against a common foe. As 



THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOMS. II 9 

soon as that was removed, they fell asunder at once 
into their original separateness. Hence the chaotic 
nature of our early annals, in which it is impossible to 
discover any real order underlying the perpetual flux 
of states and princes. 

A single story from the Chronicle will sufficiently 
illustrate the type of men whose actions make up the 
history of these predatory times. In 754, King 
Cuthred of the West Saxons died. His kinsman, 
Sigeberht, succeeded him. One year later, however, 
Cynewulf and the witan deprived Sigeberht of his 
kingdom, making over to him only the petty principality 
of Hampshire, while Cynewulf himself reigned in his 
stead. After a time Sigeberht murdered an ealdor- 
man of his suite named Cymbra; whereupon Cyne- 
wulf deprived him of his remaining territory and 
drove him forth into the forest of the Weald. There 
he lived a wild life till a herdsman met him in the 
forest and stabbed him, to avenge the death of his 
master, Cymbra. Cynewulf, in turn, after spending 
his days in fighting the Welsh, lost his hfe in a quarrel 
with Cyneheard, brother of the outlawed Sigeberht. 
He had endeavoured to drive out the setheling ; but 
Cyneheard surprised him at Merton, and slev/ him 
with all his thegns, except one Welsh hostage. Next 
day, the king's friends, headed by the ealdorman 
Osiic, fell upon the aetheling, and killed him with all 
his followers. In the very same year, ^thelbald of 
Mercia was killed fighting at Seckington ; and Offa 
drove out his successor, Beornred. Of such murders, 
vyars, surprises, and dynastic quarrels, the history of 



I20 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the eighth century is full. But no modern reader 
need know more of them than the fact that they 
existed, and that they prove the wholly ungoverned 
and ungovernable nature of the early English temper. 

Until the Danish invasions of the ninth century, 
the tribal kingdoms still remained practically separate, 
and such cohesion as existed was only secured for the 
purpose of temporary defence or aggression. Essex 
kept its own kings under ^thelberht of Kent; Huiccia 
retained its royal house under ^thelred of Mercia ; 
and later on, Mercia itself had its ealdormen, after 
the conquest by Ecgberht of Wessex. Each royal 
line reigned under the supreme power until it died 
out naturally, like our own great feudatories in India 
at the present day. " When Wessex and Mercia have 
worked their way to the rival hegemonies," says Canon 
Stubbs, " Sussex and Essex do not cease to be 
numbered among the kingdoms, until their royal 
houses are extinct. When Wessex has conquered 
Mercia and brought Northumbria on its knees, there 
are still kings in both Northumbria and Mercia. The 
royal house of Kent dies out, but the title of King 
of Kent is bestowed on an setheling, first of the 
Mercian, then of the West Saxon house. Until the 
Danish conquest, the dependant royalties seem to 
have been spared ; and even afterwards organic union 
can scarcely be said to exist" 

The final supremacy of the West Saxons was 
mainly brought about by the Danish invasion. But 
the man who laid the foundation of the West Saxon 
power was Ecgberht, the so-called first king of all 



THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOMS. 121 

England. Banished from Wessex during his youth 
by one of the constant dynastic quarrels, through the 
enmity of Offa, the young aetheling had taken refuge 
with Karl the Great, at the court of Aachen, and there 
had learnt to understand the rising statesmanship of 
the Frankish race and of the restored Roman empire. 
The death of his enemy Beorhtric, in 802, left the 
kingdom open to him : but the very day of his acces- 
sion showed him the character of the people whom he 
had come to rule. The men of Worcester celebrated 
his arrival by a raid on the men of Wilts. " On that 
ilk day," says the Chronicle, " rode ^^thelhund, 
ealdorman of the Huiccias [who were Mercians], over 
at Cynemseres ford ; and there Weohstaii the ealdor- 
man met him with the Wilts men [who were West 
Saxons :] and there was a muckle fight, and both 
ealdormen were slain, and the Wilts men won the 
day." For twenty years, Ecgberht was engaged in 
consolidating his ancestral dominions : but at the end 
of that time, he found himself able to attack the 
Mercians, who had lost Offa six years before 
Ecgberht's return. In 825, the West Saxons met the 
Mercian host at Ellandun, " and Ecgberht gained the 
day, and there was muckle slaughter." Therefore all 
the Saxon name, held tributary by the Mercians, 
gathered about the Saxon champion. " The Kentish 
folk, and they of Surrey, and the South Saxons, and 
the East Saxons turned to him." In the same year, 
the East Anglians, anxious to avoid the power of 
Mercia, '* sought Ecgberht for peace and for aid." 
Beornwulf, the Mercian king, marched against his 



122 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

revolted tributaries : but the East Anglians fought him 
stoutly, and slew him and his successor in two battles. 
Ecgberht followed up this step by annexing Mercia in 
829 : after which he marched northward against the 
Northumbrians, who at once " offered him obedience 
and peace ; and they thereupon parted." One year 
later, Ecgberht led an army against the northern 
Welsh, and *' reduced them to humble obedience." 
Thus the West Saxon kingdom absorbed all the 
others, at least so far as a loose over-lordship was con- 
cerned. Ecgberht had rivalled his master Karl by 
founding, after a fashion, the empire of the English. 
But all the local jealousies smouldered on as fiercely 
as ever, the under-kings retained their several do- 
minions, and Ecgberht's supremacy was merely one 
of superior force, unconnected with any real organic 
unity of the kingdom as a whole. Ecgberht himself 
generally bore the title of King of the West Saxons, 
like his ancestors : and though in dealing with his 
Anglian subjects he styled himself Rex Anglorum, 
that title perhaps means little more than the humbler 
one of Rex Gewissorum, which he used in addressing 
his people of the lesser principality. The real king- 
dom of the English never existed before the days of 
Eadward the Elder, and scarcely before the days of 
William the Norman and Henry the Angevin. As to 
the kingdom of England, that was a far later invention 
of the feudal lawyers 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. l'£$ 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. 

In the long period of three and a-half centuries which 
had elapsed between the Jutish conquest of Kent and 
the establishment of the West Saxc n over-lordship, the 
politics of Britain had been wholly insular. The 
island had been brought back by Augustine and his 
successors into ecclesiastical, commercial, and literary 
union with the continent : but no foreign war or inva- 
sion had ever broken the monotony of murdering the 
Welsh and harrying the surrounding English. The 
isolation of England was complete. Ship-building was 
almost an obsolete art : and the small trade which 
still centred in London seems to have been mainly 
carried on in Frisian bottoms ; for the Low Dutch of 
the continent still retained the seafaring habits which 
those of England had forgotten. But a new enemy 
was now beginning to appear in northern Europe— 
the Scandinavians. The history of the great wicking 
movement forms the subject of a separate volume in 
this series : but the manner in which the English met 
it will demand a brief treatment here. Some outline 
of the bare facts, however, must first be premised. 

As early as 789, during the reign of Offain Mercia, 
*' three ships of Northmen from Hseretha land " came 



124 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

on shore in Wessex. " Then the reeve rode against 
them, and would have driven them to the king's town, 
for he wist not what they were : and there men slew 
him. Those were the first ships of Danish men that 
ever sought English kin's land." In 795, "the harry- 
ing of- heathen men wretchedly destroyed God's 
church at Lindisfarne isle, through rapine and man- 
slaughter." In the succeeding year, "the heathen 
harried among the Northumbrians, and plundered 
Ecgberht's monastery at Wearmouth." In 832, 
"heathen men ravaged Sheppey " ; and a year later, 
" King Ecgberht fought against the crews of thirty-five 
ships at Charmouth, and there was muckle slaughter 
made, and the Danes held the battle-field." ^ In 835, 
another host came to the West Welsh (now almost 
reduced to the peninsula of Cornwall) : and the Welsh 
readily joined them against their West Saxon over- 
lord. Ecgberht met the united hosts at Hengestesdun 
and put them both to flight. It was his last success. 
In the succeeding year he died, and the kingdom 
descended to his weak son, ^thelwulf His second 
son, ^thelstan, was placed over Kent, Essex, Surrey, 
and Sussex, as under-king. 

Next spring, the flood of wickings began to pour in 
earnest over England. Thirty-three piratical ships 
sailed up Southampton Water to pillage Southampton, 
perhaps with an ultimate eye to the treasures of royal 
Winchester, the capital and minster-town of the West 

' This entry in the Chronicle, however, is probably erro- 
neous, as an exactly similar one occurs under ^thelwulf, seven 
years later. 



THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. 1 25 

Saxon over-lord himself. This was a bold attempt, 
but the West Saxons met it in full force. The ealdor- 
man Wulf heard gathered together the levy of fighting 
men, attacked the host, and put it to flight with great 
slaughter. Shortly after a second Danish host landed 
near Portland, doubtless to plunder Dorchester : and 
the local ealdorman ^thelhelm, falling upon them 
with the levy of Dorset men, was defeated after a 
sharp struggle, leaving the heathen in possession of 
the field. It was not in Wessex, however, that the 
wickings were to. make their great success. The north 
had long suffered from terrible anarchy, and was a 
ready prey for any invader. Out of fourteen kings 
who had reigned in North umbria during the eighth 
century, no less than seven were put to death and six 
expelled by their rebellious subjects. Christian 
Northumbria, which in Baeda's days had been the 
most flourishing part of Britain, was now reduced to 
a mere agglomeration of petty princes and clans, 
dependent on the West Saxon over-lord, and utterly 
unconnected with one another in feeling or sympathy. 
Already we have seen how the Danes harried North- 
umbria without opposition. The same was probably 
the case with the whole Anglian coast on the east. 
In 840, the wickings fell on the fen country. *' The 
ealdorman Hereberht was slain by heathen men, and 
many with him among the marsh-men." All down 
the east coast, the piratical fleet proceeded, burning 
and slaughtering as it went. " In the same }^ear, in 
Lindsey, and in East Anglia, and among the Kent 
men, many men were slain by the host." A year 



126 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

later, the wickings returned, growing bolder as they 
found out the helplessness of the people. They sailed 
up the Thames, and ravaged Rochester and London, 
with great slaughter ; after which they crossed the 
channel and fell upon Cwantawic, or Staples, a com- 
mercial port in the Saxon land of the Boulonnais. In 
842, a Danish host defeated ^thelwulf himself at 
Charmouth in Dorset ; and in the succeeding summer 
" the ealdorman Eanulf, with the Somerset levy, and 
Bishop Ealhstan and the ealdorman Osric, with the 
Dorset levy, fought at Parretmouth with the host, and 
made a muckle slaughter, and won the day." 

The utter weakness of the first English resistance is. 
well shown in these facts. A terrible flood of heathen 
savagery was let loose upon the country, and the 
people were wholly unable to cope with it. There 
was absolutely no central organisation, no army, no 
commissariat, no ships. The heathen host landed 
suddenly wherever it found the people unprepared, 
and fell upon the larger towns for plunder. The local 
authority, the ealdorman or the under-king, hastily 
gathered together the local levy in arms, and fell upon 
the pirates tumultuously with the men of the shire as 
best he might. But he had no provisions for a long 
campaign : and when the levy had fought once, it 
melted away immediately, every man going back again 
of necessity to his own home. If it won the battle, it 
went home to drink over its success : if it lost, it dis- 
solved, demoralized, and left the burghers to fight for 
their own walls, or to buy off the heathen with their 
own money. But every shire and every kingdom 



THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. ^8^ 

fought for itself alone. If the Dorset men could only 
drive away the host from Charmouth and Portland, 
they cared little whether it sailed away to harry Sussex 
and Hants. If the Northumbrians could only drive 
it away from the Humber, they cared little whether it 
set sail for the Thames and the Solent. The North 
Folk of East Anglia were equally happy to send it off 
toward the South Folk. While there was so little 
cohesion between the parts of the same kingdoms, 
there was no cohesion at all between the different 
kingdoms over which ^thelwulf exercised a nominal 
over-lordship. The West Saxon kings fought for 
Dorset and for Kent, but there is no trace of their 
ever fighting for East Anglia or for Northumbria. 
They left their northern vassals to take care of them- 
selves. " It was never a war between the Danes and 
the national army," says Prof. Pearson, " but between 
the Danes and a local militia." It would have been 
impossible, indeed, to resist the wickings effectually 
without a strong central system, which could move 
large armies rapidly from, point to point : and such a 
system was quite undreamt of in the half-consolidated 
England of the ninth century. Only war with a 
foreign invader could bring it about even in a faint 
degree : and that was exactly what the Danish invasion 
did for Wessex. 

The year 851 marks an important epocn in the 
English resistance. The annual horde of wickings 
had now become as regular in its recurrence as 
summer itself; and even the inert West Saxon kings 
began to feel that permanent measures must be taken 



128 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

against them. They had built ships, and tried to 
tackle the invaders in the only way in which so par- 
tially civilised a race could tackle such tactics as those 
of the Danes— upon the sea. A host of wickings 
came round to Sandwich in Kent. The under-king 
^thelstan fell upon them with his new navy, and 
took nine of their ships, putting the rest to flight with 
great slaughter. But in the same year another great 
host of 250 sail, by far the largest fleet of which we 
have yet heard, came to the mouth of the Thames, 
and there landed, a step which marks a fresh depar- 
ture in the wicking tactics. They took Canterbury 
by assault, and then marched on to London. There 
they stormed the busy merchant town, and put to 
flight Beorhtwulf, the under-king of the Mercians, 
with his local levy. Thence they proceeded south- 
ward into Surrey, doubtless on their way to Winchester. 
King ^thelwulf met them at Ockley, with the West- 
Saxon levy, " and there made the greatest slaughter 
among the heathen host that we have yet heard7 and 
gained the day." In spite of these two great suc- 
cesses, however, both of which show an increasing 
statesmanship on the part of the West Saxons, this 
year was memorable in another way, for "the heathen 
men for the first time sat over winter in Thanet." The 
loose predatory excursions were beginning to take the 
complexion of regular conquest and permanent 
settlement. 

Yet so little did the English still realise the terrible 
danger of the heathen invasion, that next year ^thel- 
wulf was fighting the Welsh of Wales ; and two years 



THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. 129 

after he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, " with great 
pomp, and dwelt there twelve months, and then fared 
homeward." In that same year, "heathen men sat 
over winter in Sheppey.'" 

After ^thelwulfs death the English resistance 
grew fainter and fainter. In 860, under his second 
son, ^thelberht, a Danish host took Winchester 
itself by storm. Five years later, a heathen army 
settled in Thanet, and the men of Kent agreed to 
buy peace of them — the first sign of that evil habit 
of buying off the Dane, which grew gradually into a 
hxed custom. But the host stole away during the 
truce for collecting the mone^', and harried all Kent 
unawares. 

Meanwhile, we hear little of the North. The 
almost utter destruction of its records during the 
heathen domination restricts us for information to the 
West Saxon chronicles ; and they have little to tell us 
about any but their own affairs. In 866, however, 
we learn that there came a great heathen host to 
East Anglia — an organised expedition under two 
chieftains — " and took winter quarters there, and 
were horsed ; and the East Anglians made peace 
with them." Next year, this permanent host sailed 
northward to Humber, and attacked York. The 
Northumbrians, as usual, were at strife among them- 
selves, two rival kings fighting for the supremacy. 
The burghers of York admitted the heathen host 
within the walls. Then the rival kings fell upon 
the town, broke the slender fortifications, and rushed 
into the city. The Danes attacked them both, and 

K 



13© ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

defeated them with great slaughter. Northumbria 
passed at once into the power of the heathen. Their 
chiefs, Ingvar and Ubba, erected Deira into a new 
Danish kingdom, leaving Bernicia to an English 
puppet; and Northumbria ceases to exist for the 
present as a factor in Anglo-Saxon history. We must 
hand it over for sixty years to the Scandinavian 
division of this series. 

In 868, Ingvar and Ubba advanced again into 
Mercia and beset Nottingham. Then the under-king 
Burhred called in the aid of his over-lord, ^thelred 
of Wessex, who came to his assistance with a levy. 
" But there was no hard fight there, and the Mercians 
made peace with the host." In 870, the heathen 
overran East Anglia, and destroyed the great monas- 
tery of Peterborough, probably the richest religious 
house in all England. Eadmund, the under-king, 
came against them with the levy, but they slew him ; 
and the people held him for a martyr, whose shrine 
at Bury St. Edmunds grew in after days into the 
holiest spot in East Anglia. The Danes harried the 
whole country, burnt the monasteries, and annexed 
Norfolk and Suffolk as a second Danish kingdom. 
East AngHa, too, disappears for a while from our 
English annals. 

Lastly, the Danes turned against Mercia and 
Wessex. In 871, a host under Bagsecg and Half 
dene came to Reading, which belonged to the lattei 
territory, when the local ealdorman engaged them and 
won a slight victory. Shortly afterward the Wesl 
Saxon king ^thelred, with his brother Alfred, came 



THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANESi I3I 

up, and engaged them a second time with worse suc- 
cess. Three other bloody battles followed, in all of 
which the Danes were beaten with heavy loss ; but 
the West Saxons also suffered severely. For three 
years the host moved up and down through Mercia 
and Wessex ; and the Mercians stood by, aiding 
neither side, but " making peace with the host " from 
time to time. At last, however, in 874, the heathens 
finally annexed the greater part of Mercia itself. 
"The host fared from Lindsey to Repton, and there 
sat for the winter, and drove King Burhred over sea, 
two and twenty years after he came to the kingdom ; 
and they subdued all the land. And Burhred went 
to Rome, and there settled ; and his body lies in 
St. Mary's Church, in the school of the English kin. 
And in the same year they gave the kingdom of 
Mercia in ward to Ceolwulf, an unwise thegn ; and he 
swore oaths to them, and gave hostages that it 
should be ready for them on whatso day they willed ; 
and that he would be ready with his own body, and 
with all who would follow him, for the behoof of the 
host." Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while out 
of our history, and Wessex alone of all the English 
kingdoms remains. 

This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles 
is necessarily tedious, yet it cannot be omitted without 
slurring over some highly important and interesting 
facts. It is impossible not to be struck with the 
extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce 
heathen invaders overran two great Christian and 
comparatively civilised states. We cannot but con- 
K 2 



132 4NGLO-SAXON BRITAIN,, 

trast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarm- 
ness of Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally 
made by Alfred in Wessex. The contrast may be 
partly due, it is true, to the absence of native North- 
umbrian and Mercian accounts. We might, perhaps, 
find, had we fuller details, that the men of Bernicia 
and Deira made a harder fight for their lands and 
their churches than the West Saxon annals would lead 
us to suppose. Still, after making all allowance for 
the meagreness of our authorities, there remains the 
indubitable fact that a heathen kingdom was estab- 
lished in the pure English land of Baeda and Cuth- 
berht, while the Christian faith and the Saxon 
nationality held their own for ever in peninsular and 
half-Celtic Wessex. 

The difference is doubtless due in part to merely 
surface causes. East Anglia had long lost her 
autonomy, and, while sometimes ruled by Mercia, was 
sometimes broken up under several ealdormen. For 
her and for Northumbria the conquest was but a 
change from a West Saxon to a Danish master. The 
house of Ecgberht had broken down the national and 
tribal organisation, and was incapable of substituting 
a central organisation in its place. With no roads 
and no communications such a centralising scheme 
is really impracticable. The disintegrated English 
kingdoms made little show of fighting for their Saxon 
over-lord. They could accept a Dane for master 
almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon. 

But besides these surface causes, there was a deeper 
and more fundamental cause underlying the difference 



THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. 1 33 

The Scandinavians were nearer to the pure English 
in blood and speech than they were to the Saxons. 
In their old home the two races had lived close 
together, — in Sleswick, Jutland, and Scania, — while 
the Saxons had dwelt further south, near the Frankish 
border, by the lowlands of the Elbe. To the English 
of Northumbria, the Saxons of Wessex were almost 
foreigners. Even at the present day, when the exist- 
ence of a recognised literary dialect has done so 
much to obliterate provincial varieties of speech in 
England, a Dorsetshire peasant, speaking in a slightly 
altered form the classical West Saxon of Alfred, has 
great difficulty in understanding a Yorkshire peasant, 
speaking in a slightly altered form the classical 
Northumbrian of Baeda. But in the ninth century 
the differences between the two dialects were pro- 
bably far greater. On the other hand, though Danish 
and Anglian have widely separated at the present 
day, and were widely distinct even in the days of 
Cnut, it is probable that at this earlier period they 
were still, to some extent, mutually comprehensible. 
Thus, the heathen Scandinavian may have seemed to 
the Northumbrian and the East Anglian almost like a 
fellow-countryman, while the West Saxon seemed in 
part like an enemy and an intruder. At any rate, 
the similarity of blood and language enabled the two 
races rapidly to coalesce ; and when the cloud rises 
again from the North half a century later, the distinc- 
tion of Dane and Englishman has almost ceased in 
the conquered provinces. It is worthy of note in 
this connection that the part of Mercia afterwards 



134 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

given over by Alfred to Guthrum, was the Anglian 
half, while the part retained by Wessex was mostly 
the Saxon half — the land conquered by Penda from 
the West Saxons two hundred years before. 

Nor must we suppose that this first wave of Scandi- 
navian conquest in any way swamped or destroyed 
the underlying English population of the North. 
The conquerors came merely as a " host," or army of 
occupation, not as a body of rural colonists. They 
left the conquered English in possession of their 
homes, though they seized upon the manors for them- 
selves, and kept the higher dignities of the vanquished 
provinces in their own hands. Being rapidly con- 
verted to Christianity, they amalgamated readily with 
the native people. Few women came over with them, 
and intermarriage with the English soon broke down 
the wall of separation. The archbishopric of York 
continued its succession uninterruptedly throughout 
the Danish occupation. The Bishops of Elmham lived 
through the stormy period ; those of Leicester trans- 
ferred their see to Dorchester-on-the-Thames ; those 
of Lichfield apparently kept up an unbroken series. 
We may gather that beneath the surface the North 
remained just as steadily English under the Danish 
princes as the whole country afterwards remained 
steadily English under the Norman kings. 

There was, however, one section of the true English 
race which kept itself largely free from the Scandi- 
navian host. North of the Tyne the Danes appa- 
rently spread but sparsely ; English ealdormen con- 
tinued to rule at Bamborough over the land between 



THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES. I35 

Forth and Tyne. Hence Northumberland and the 
Lothians remained more purely English than any 
other part of Britain. The people of the South are 
Saxons : the people of the West are half Celts ; the 
people of the North and the Midlands are largely 
intermixed with Danes ; but the people of the Scottish 
lowlands, from Forth to Tweed, are almost purely 
English ; and the dialect which we always describe as 
Scotch is the strongest, the tersest, a-nd the most 
native modern form of the original Anglo-Saxon 
tongue. If we wish to find the truest existing repre- 
sentative of the genuine pure-blooded English race, 
we must look for him, not in Mercia or in Wessex, 
but amongst the sturdy and hard-headed farmers of 
Tweedside and Lammermoor. 



136 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN, 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX. 

Only one English kingdom now held out against the 
wickings, and that was Wessex. Its comparatively 
successful resistance may be set down, in some slight 
degree, to the energy of a single man, yElfred, though 
it was doubtless far more largely due to the rela- 
tively strong organisation of the West Saxon state. 
In judging of Alfred, we must lay aside the false 
notions derived from the application of words ex- 
pressing late ideas to an early and undeveloped stage 
of civilised society. To call him a great general or a 
great statesman is to use utterly misleading terms. 
Generalship and statesmanship, as we understand 
them, did not yet exist, and to speak of them in the 
ninth century in England is to be guilty of a common, 
but none the more excusable, anachronism. Alfred 
was a sturdy and hearty fighter, and a good king of a 
semi-barbaric people. As a la'd, he had visited Rome ; 
and he retained throughout life a strong sense of his 
own and his people's barbarism, and a genuine desire 
to civilise himself and his subjects, so far as his limited 
lights could carry him. He succeeded to a kingdom 
overrun from end to end by piratical hordes : and he 
did his best to restore peace and to promote order. 



THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX. 1 37 

But his character was merely that of a practical, 
common-sense, fighting West Saxon, brought up in 
the camp of his father and brothers, and doing his 
rough work in life with the honest straightforwardness 
of a simple, hard-headed, religious, but only half- 
educated barbaric soldier. 

The successful East Anglian wickings, under their 
chief Guthrum, turned at once to ravage Wessex. 
They "harried the West Saxons' land, and settled 
there, and drove many of the folk over sea." For 
awhile it seemed as if Wessex too was to fall into 
their hands. ^Elfred himself, with a little band, 
"withdrew to the woods and moor-fastnesses." He 
took refuge in the Somerset marshes, and there occu- 
pied a little island of dry land in the midst of the 
fens, by name Athelney. Here he threw up a rude 
earthwork, from which he made raids against the 
Danes, with a petty levy of the nearest Somerset 
men. But the mass of the West Saxons were not dis- 
posed to give in so easily. The long border warfare 
with Devon and Cornwall had probably kept up their 
organisation in a better state than that of the anarchic 
North. The men of Somerset and Wilts, with those 
Hampshire men who had not fled to the Continent, 
gathered at a sacred stone on the borders of Selwood 
Forest, and there Alfred met them with his little 
band. They attacked the host, which they put to 
flight, and then besieged it in its fortified camp. 
To escape the siege, Guthrum consented to leave 
Wessex, and to accept Christianity. He was bap- 
tised at once, with thirty of his principal chiefs, after 



138 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the rough-and-ready fashion of the fighting king, near 
Athehiey. The treaty entered into with Guthrum 
restored to Alfred all Wessex, with the south-western 
part of Mercia, from London to Bedford, and thence 
along the line of Watling Street to Chester. Thus 
for a time the Saxons recovered their autonomy, and 
the great Scandinavian horde retired to East Anglia. 
^thelred, Alfred's son-in-law, was appointed unde:'- 
king of recovered Mercia. Henceforward, Teutonic 
Britain remains for awhile divided into Wessex and 
the Denalagu — that is to say, the district governed by 
Danish law. 

Though peace was thus made with Guthrum, new 
bodies of wickings came pouring southward from 
Scandinavia. One of these sailed up the Thames to 
Fulham, but after spending some time there, they 
went over to the Frankish coast, where their depreda- 
tions were long and severe. Throughout all Alfred's 
reign, with only two intervals of peace, the wickings 
kept up a constant series of attacks on the coast, and 
frequently penetrated inland. From time to time, 
the great horde under Haesten poured across the 
country, cutting the corn and driving away the cattle, 
and retreating into East Anglia, or Northumbria, or 
the peninsula of the Wirrall, whenever they were 
seriously worsted. "Thanks be to God," says the 
Chronicle pathetically " the host had not wholly 
broken up all the English kin ; " but the misery of 
England must have been intense. Alfred, however, 
introduced two military changes of great importance. 
He set on foot something like a regulai: army, with a 



THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX. T39 

settled commissariat, dividing his forces into two 
bodies, so that one-half was constantly at home tilling 
the soil while the other half was in the field ; and he 
built large ships on a new plan, which he manned with 
Frisians, as well as with English, and which largely 
aided in keeping the coast fairly free from Danish 
invasion during the two intervals of peace. 

Throughout the whole of the ninth century, how- 
ever, and the early part of the tenth, the whole history 
of England is the history of a perpetual pillage. No 
man who sowed could tell whether he might reap or 
not. The Englishman lived in constant fear of life 
and goods ; he was liable at any moment to be called 
out against the enemy. Whatever little civilisation 
had ever existed in the country died out almost alto- 
gether. The Latin language was forgotten even by 
the priests. War had turned everybody into fighters ; 
commerce was impossible when the towns were sacked 
year after year by the pirates. But in the rare intervals 
of peace, Alfred did his best to civilise his people. 
The amount of work with which he is credited is truly 
astonishing. He translated into English with his 
own hand "The History of the World," by Orosius ; 
Bseda's "Ecclesiastical History;" Boethius's " De 
Consolatione," and Gregory's " Regula Pastoralis." 
At his court, too, if not under his own direction, the 
English Chronicle was first begun, and many of 
the sentences quoted from that great document in 
this work are probably due to Alfred himself. His 
devotion to the church was shown by the regular 
communication which he kept up with Rome, and by 



140 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the -gifts which he sent from his impoverished king- 
dom, not only to the shrine of St. Peter but even to 
that of St. Thomas in India. No doubt his vigorous 
personality counted for much in the struggle with the 
Danes; but his death in 901 left the West Saxons as 
ready as ever to contend against the northern enemy. 
One result of the Danish invasion of Wessex must 
not be passed over. The common danger seems to 
have firmly welded together Welshman and Saxon 
into a single nationality. The most faithful part of 
Alfred's dominions were the West Welsh shires of 
Somerset and Devon, with the half Celtic folk of 
Dorset and Wilts. The result is seen in the change 
which comes over the relations between the two 
races. In Ine's laws the distinction between Welsh- 
men and Englishmen is strongly marked ; the price 
of blood for the servile population is far less than 
that of their lords : in Alfred's laws the distinction 
has died out. Compared to the heathen Dane, West 
Saxons and West Welsh were equally Englishmen. 
From that day to this, the Celtic peasantry of the 
West Country have utterly forgotten their Welsh kin- 
ship, save in wholly Cymric Cornwall alone. The 
Devon and Somerset men have for centuries been as 
English in tongue and feeling as the people of Kent 
or Sussex. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 1 4] 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH. 

The history of the tenth century and the first half 
of the eleventh consists entirely of the continued 
contest between the West Saxons and the Scandina- 
vians. It falls naturally into three periods. The first 
is that of the English reaction, when the West Saxon 
kings, Eadward and ^thelstan, gradually reconquered 
v^e Danish North by inches at a time. The second 
is that of the Augustan age, when Dunstan and 
Eadgar held together the whole of Britain for a while 
in the hands of a single West Saxon over-lord. The 
third is that of the decadence, when, under ^thelred, 
the ill-welded empire fell asunder, and the Danish 
kings, Cnut, Harold, and Harthacnut, ruled over 
all England, including even the unconquered Wessex 
of Alfred himself. 

At Alfred's death, his dominions comprised the 
larger Wessex, from Kent to the Cornish border at 
Exeter, together with the portion of Mercia south- 
west of Watling Street. The former kingdom passed 
into the hands of his son Eadward ; the latter was 
still held by the ealdorman ^thelred, who had mar- 
ried Alfred's daughter ^thelflaed. The departure 
of the Danish host, led by Haesten, left the English 



142 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

time to breathe and to recruit their strength. Hence- 
forth, for nearly a century, the direct wicking incur- 
sions cease, and the war is confined to a long struggle 
with the Northmen already settled in England. Four 
years later, the east AngUan Danes broke the peace 
and harried Mercia and Wessex ; but Eadward over- 
ran their lands in return, and the Kentish men, in a 
separate battle, attacked and slew Eric their king with 
several of his earls. In 912, ^thelred the Mercian 
died, and Eadward at once incorporated London and 
Oxford with his own dominions, leaving his sister 
^^ithelflsed only the northern half of her husband's 
principality. Thenceforth ^thelflaed, " the Lady of 
the Mercians," turned deliberately to the conquest of 
the North. She adopted a fresh kind of tactics, 
which mark again a new departure in the English 
policy. Instead of keeping to the old plan of 
alternate harryings on either side, and precarious 
tenure of lands from time to time, ^thelflaed 
began building regular fortresses or burhs all along 
her north-eastern frontiers, using these afterwards 
as bases for fresh operations against the enemy. 
The spade went hand in hand with the sword : the 
English were becoming engineers as well as fighters. 
In the year of her husband's death, the Lady built 
burhs at Sarrat and Bridgnorth. The next year "she 
went with all the Mercians to Tamworth, and built 
the burh there in early summer ; and ere Lammas, 
that at Stafford." In the two succeeding years she 
set up other strongholds at Eddesbury, Warwick, 
Cherbury, Wardbury, and Runcorn. By 917, she 



THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH. 1 43 

found herself strong enough to attack Derby, one of 
the chief cities in the Danish confederacy of the Five 
Burgs, which she captured after a hard siege. Thence 
she turned on Leicester, which capitulated on her 
approach, the Danish host going over quietly to her 
side. She was in communication with the Danes of 
York for the surrender of that city, too, when she 
died suddenly in her royal town of Tamworth, in the 
year 918. 

Meanwhile Eadward had been pushing forward his 
own boundary in the east, building btirhs at Hertford 
and Witham, and endeavouring to subjugate the 
Danish league in Bedford, Huntingdon, and North- 
ampton. In 915, Thurketel, the jarl of Bedford, 
" sought him for lord," and Eadward afterwards built a 
biirh there also. On his sister's death, he annexed all 
her territories, and then, in a fierce and long doubtful 
struggle, reconquered not only Huntingdon and 
Northampton but East Anglia as well. The Christian 
English hailed him as a deliverer. Next, he turned 
on Stamford, the Danish capital of the Fens, and on 
Nottingham, the stronghold of the Southumbrian 
host. In both towns he erected hurhs. These suc- 
cesses once more placed the West Saxon king in the 
foremost position amongst the many rulers of Britain. 
The smaller principalities, unable to hold their own 
against the Scandinavians, began spontaneously to 
rally round Eadward as their leader and suzerain. 
In the same year with the conquest of Stamford, " the 
kings of the North Welsh, Howel, and Ciedauc, and 
Jeothwel, and all the North Welsh kin, sought him 



144 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

for lord." In 923, Eadward pushed further north- 
ward, and sent a Mercian host to conquer " Man- 
chester in Northumbria," and fortify and man it. 
A hne of twenty fortresses now girdled the English 
frontier, from Colchester, through Bedford and Not- 
tingham, to Manchester and Chester. Next year, 
Eadward himself, now immediate king of all England 
south of Humber, attacked the last remaining Danish 
kingdom, Northumbria, throwing a bridge across the 
Trent at Nottingham, and marching against Bakewell 
in Peakland, where again he built a burh. The new 
tactics were too fine for the rough and ready Danish 
leaders. Before Eadward reached York, the entire 
North submitted without a blow. " The king of Scots, 
and all the Scottish kin, and Ragnald [Danish king 
of York], and the sons of Eadulf [English kings of 
Bamborough], and all who dwell in Northumbria, as 
well English as Danes and Northmen and others, and 
also the king of the Strathclyde Welsh and all the 
Strathclyde Welsh, sought him for father and for 
lord." This was in 924. Next year, Eadward "rex 
invictus " died, over-lord of all Britain from sea to sea, 
while the whole country south of the Humber, save 
only Wales and Cornwall, was now practically united 
into a single kingdom of England. 

But the seeming submission of the North was falla- 
cious. The Danes had reintroduced into Britain a 
fresh mass of incoherent barbarism, which could not 
thus readily coalesce. The Scandinavian leaven in 
the population had put back the shadow on the dial 
of England some three centuries. ^-Ethelstan, Ead- 



THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH 1 45 

ward's son, found himself obliged to give his sister in 
marriage to Sihtric or Sigtrig, Danish king of the York- 
shire Northumbrians, which probably marks a recog- 
nition of his vassal's equaUty. Soon after, however, 
Sihtric died, and ^thelstan made himself first king of 
all England by adding Northumbria to his own imme- 
diate dominions. Then " he bowed to himself all 
the kings who were in this island ; first, Howel, king 
of the West Welsh ; and Constantine, king of Scots ; 
and Owen, king of Gwent [South Wales] ; and 
Ealdred, son of Ealdulf of Bamborough ; and with 
pledge and with oaths sware they peace, and forsook 
every kind of heathendom." In the West, he drove 
the Welsh from Exeter, which they had till then 
occupied in common with the English, and fixed 
their boundary at the Tamar. But once move the 
pretended vassals rebelled. Constantine, king of 
Scots, threw oft' his allegiance, and ^thelstan there 
upon " went into Scotland, both with a land host 
and a ship host, and harried a mickle deal of it." 
In 937, the feudatories made a final and united effort 
to throw off the West Saxon yoke. The Scots, the 
Strathclyde Welsh, the people of Wales and Cornwall, 
the lords of Bamborough, and the Danes throughout 
the North and East, all rose together in a great league 
against their over-lord. Anlaf; king of the Dublin 
Danes, came over from Ireland to aid them, with a 
large body of wickings. The confederates met the West 
Saxon /i'^^ or levy at an unknown spot named Brunan- 
burh, where ^thelstan overthrew them in a crushing 
defeat, which forms the subject of a fine war-song, 

L 



146 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN 

inserted in full in the English Chronicle.! Three 
years later ^thelstan died, as his father had died 
before him, undisputed over-lord of all Britain, and 
immediate king of the whole Teutonic portion. 

Yet once more the feeble unity of the country 
broke hopelessly asunder. Eadmund, who succeeded 
his brother, found the Danes of the North and the 
Midlands again insubordinate. The year after his 
accession " the Northumbrians beUed their oath, and 
chose Anlaf of Ireland for king." The Five Burgs 
went too, and the old boundary of Watling Street was 
once more made the frontier of the Danish posses- 
sions. In 944, however, Eadmund subdued all 
Northumbria, and expelled its Danish kings. His 
recovery of the Five Burgs, and the joy of the Chris- 
tian English inhabitants, are vividly set forth in a frag- 
mentary ballad embedded in the Chronicle. The next 
year he harried Strathclyde or Cumberland, the Welsh 
kingdom between Clyde and Morecambe, and handed 
it over to Malcolm, king of Scots, as a pledge of his 
fidelity. At Eadmund's death in 946 — when he was 
stabbed in his royal hall by an outlaw — his kingdom 
fell to his brother Eadred. Two years later North- 
umbria again revolted, and chose Eric for its king. 
Eadred harried and burnt the province, which he 
then handed over to an earl of his own creation, one 
of the Bamborough family. The king himself died 
in 955, and was succeeded by his nephew Eadwig. 
But Northumbria and Mercia revolted once more, 

' See chapter xx. 



THE RECilVERY OF THE NORTH. I47 

and chose Eadwig's brother, Eadgar, instead, of their 
own Danish princes. Eadwig died in 958, and 
Eadgar then became king of all three provinces; 
thus finally uniting the whole of Teutonic England 
into one kingdom. 

Eadgar's reign forms the climax of the West Saxon 
power. It was, in fact, the only period when England 
can be said to have enjoyed any national unity under 
the Anglo-Saxon dynasties. The strong hand of a 
priest gave peace for some years to the ill-organised 
mass. Dunstan was probably the first EngUshman 
who seriously deserves the name of statesman. He 
was born in the half-Celtic region of Somerset, beside 
the great abbey of Glastonbury, which held the bones 
of Arthur, and a good deal of the imaginative Celtic 
temper ran probably with the blood in his veins. ^ 
But he was above all the representative of the Roman 
civilisation in the barbarised, half-Danish England of 
the tenth century. He was a musician, a painter, a 
reader, and a scholar, in a world of fierce warriors 

' It is impossible to avoid noticing the increased importance 
of semi-Celtic Britain under Dunstan's administration. He 
was himself at first an abbot of the old West Welsh monastery 
of Glastonbury : he promoted West countrymen to the principal 
posts in the kingdom : and he had Eadgar hallowed king at the 
ancient West Welsh royal city of Bath, married to a Devon- 
shire lady, and buried at Glastonbury. Indeed, that monastery 
was under Dunstan what Westminster was under the later 
kings. Florence uses the strange expression that Eadgar was 
chosen "by the Anglo-Britons:" and the meeting with the 
Welsh and Scotch princes in the semi-Welsh town of Chester 
conveys a like implication. 

L 2 



148 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

and ignorant nobles. Eadmund made him abbot of 
Glastonbury. Eadgar appointed him first bishop of 
London, and then, on Eadwig's death, Archbishop of 
Canterbury. It was Dunstan who really ruled 
England throughout the remainder of his life. Es- 
sentially an organiser and administrator, he was able 
to weld the unwieldy empire into a rough unity, 
which lasted as long as its author lived, and no 
longer. He appealed the discontent of Northum- 
bria and the Five Burgs by permitting them a certain 
amount of local independence, with the enjoyment of 
their own laws and their own lawmen. He kept a 
fleet of boats cruising in the Irish Sea to check the 
Danish hosts at Dublin and Waterford. He put 
forward a code, known as the laws of Eadgar, for the 
better government of Wessex and the South. He 
made the over-lordship of the West Saxons over 
their British vassals more real than it had ever been 
before ; and a tale, preserved by Florence, tells us 
that eight tributary kings rowed Eadgar in his royal 
barge on the Dee, in token of their complete subjec- 
tion. Internally, Dunstan revived the declining 
spirit of monasticism, which had died down during 
the long struggle with the Danes, and attempted to 
reintroduce some tinge of southern civilisation into 
the barbarised and half-paganised country in which 
he lived. Wherever it was possible, he " drove out the 
priests, and set monks," and he endeavoured to make 
the monasteries, which had degenerated during the 
long war into mere landowning communities, regain 
once more their old position as centres of culture 



THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH. 149 

and learning. During his own time his efforts were 
successful, and even after his death the movement 
which he had begun continued in this direction to 
make itself felt, though in a feebler and less intelligent 
form. 

One act of Dunstan's policy, however, had far- 
reaching results, of a kind which he himself could 
never have anticipated. He handed over all North - 
umbria beyond the Tweed — the region now known as 
the Lothians — as a fief to Kenneth, king of Scots. 
This accession of territory wholly changed the 
character of the Scottish kingdom, and largely pro- 
moted the Teutonisation of the Celtic North. The 
Scottish princes now took up their residence in the 
English town of Edinburgh, and learned to speak the 
English language as their mother-tongue. Already 
Eadmund had made over Strathclyde or Cumberland 
to Malcolm; and thus the dominions of the Scottish 
kings extended over the whole of the country now 
known as Scotland, save only the Scandinavian jarl- 
doms of Caithness, Sutherland, and the Isles. 
Strathclyde rapidly adopted the tongue of its masters, 
and grew as English in language (though not in blood) 
as the Lothians themselves. Fife, in turn, was 
quickly Anglicised, as was also the whole region south 
of the Highland line. Thus a new and powerful king- 
dom arose in the North ; and at the same time the 
cession of an English district to the Scottish kings 
had the curious result of thoroughly Anglicising two 
large and important Celtic regions, which had hitherto 
resisted every effort of the Northumbrian or West 



150 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Saxon over-lords,, There is no reason to believe 
however, that this introduction of the English tongue 
and English manners was connected with any consi- 
derable immigration of Teutonic settlers into the 
Anglicised tracts. The population of Ayrshire, of 
Fife, of Perthshire, and of Aberdeen, still shows 
every sign of Celtic descent, alike in physique, in 
temperament, and in habit of thought. The change 
was, in all probability, exactly analogous to that which 
we ourselves have seen taking place in Wales, in 
Ireland, and in the Celtic north of Scotland at the 
present day. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 153 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE AUGUSTAN AGE AND THE LATER ANGLO-SAXON 
CIVILISATION. 

The slight pause in the long course of Danish 
warfare which occurred during the vigorous adminis- 
tration of Dunstan, affords the best opportunity for 
considering the degree of civilisation reached by the 
English in the last age before the Norman Conquest. 
Our materials for such an estimate are partly to be 
found in existing buildings, manuscripts, pictures, or- 
naments, and oiher archaeological remains, and partly 
in the documentary evidence of the chronicles and 
charters, and more especially of the great survey 
undertaken by the Conqueror's commissioners, and 
known as Domesday Book. From these sources we 
are enabled to gain a fairly complete view of the 
Anglo-Saxon culture in the period immediately pre- 
ceding the immense influx of Romance civilisation 
after the Conquest ; and though some such Romance 
influence was already exerted by the Normanising 
tendencies of Eadward the Confessor, we may 
yet conveniently consider the whole subject here 
under the age of Eadgar and ^thelred. It is diffi- 
cult, indeed, to trace any very great improvement in 
the arts of life between the days of Dunstan and the 
days of Harold. 



152 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

In spite of constant wars and ravages from the 
northern pirates, there can be little doubt that Eng- 
land had been slowly advancing in material civilisa- 
tion ever since the introduction of Christianity, The 
heathen intermixture in the North and the Midlands 
had retarded the advance but had not completely 
checked it ; while in Wessex and the South the inter- 
course with the continent and the consequent growth 
in culture had been steadily increasing, ^^thelwulf 
of Wessex married a daughter of Karl the Bald; 
Alfred gave his daughter to a count of Flanders ; and 
Eadward's princesses were married respectively to the 
emperor, to the king of France, and to the king 
of Provence. Such alliances show a considerable 
degree of intercourse between Wessex and the 
Roman world ; and the relics of material civilisation 
fully bear out the inference. The Institutes of the 
city of London mention traders from Brabant, Liege, 
Rouen, Ponthieu, France (in the restricted sense), 
and the Empire ; but these came " in their own 
vessels." England, which now has in her hands 
the carrying trade of the world, was still dependent 
for her own supply on foreign bottoms. We know 
also that officers were appointed to collect tolls from 
foreign merchants at Canterbury, Dover, Arundel, 
and many other towns; and London and Bristol 
certainly traded on their own account with the 
Continent. 

As a whole, however, England still remained a 
purely agricultural country to the very end of the 
Anglo-Saxon period. It had but little foreign trade, 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE. T53 

and what little existed was chiefly confined to imports 
of articles of luxury (wine, silk, spices, and artistic 
works) for the wealthier nobles, and of ecclesiastical 
requisites, such as pictures, incense, relics, vestments, 
and like southern products for the churches and 
monasteries. The exports seem mainly to have con- 
sisted of slaves and wool, though hides may possibly 
have been sent out of the country, and a little of the 
famous English gold-work and embroidery was 
perhaps sold abroad in return for the few imported 
luxuries. But taking the country at a glance, we 
must still picture it to ourselves as composed almost 
entirely of separate agricultural manors, each now 
owned by a considerable landowner, and tilled mainly 
by his churls, whose position had sunk during the 
Danish wars to that of semi-servile tenants, owing 
customary rents of labour to their superiors. War 
had told against the independence of the lesser 
freemen, who found themselves compelled to choose 
themselves protectors among the higher born classes, 
till at last the theory became general that every man 
must have a lord. The noble himself lived upon his 
manor, accepted service from his churls in tilling his 
own homestead, and allowed them lands in return in 
the outlying portions of his estates. His sources of 
income were two only : first, the agricultural produce 
of his lands, thus tilled for him by free labour and by 
the hands of his serfs ; and secondly, the breeding of 
slaves, shipped from the ports of London and Bristol 
for the markets of the south. The artisans depended 
wholly upon their lord, being often serfs, or else 



154 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

churls holding on service-tenure. The mass of Eng- 
land consisted of such manors, still largely inter- 
spersed with woodland, each with the wooden hall of 
its lord occupying the centre of the homestead, and 
with the huts of the churls and serfs among the hays 
and valleys of the outskirts. The butter and cheese, 
bread and bacon, were made at home ; the corn was 
ground in the quern ; the beer was brewed and the 
honey collected by the family. The spinner and 
weaver, the shoemaker, smith, and carpenter, were all 
parts of the household. Thus every manor was 
wholly self-sufficing and self-sustaining, and towns 
were rendered almost unnecessary. 

Forests and heaths still also covered about half the 
surface. These were now the hunting-grounds of the 
kings and nobles, while in the leys, hursts, and dens, 
small groups of huts gave shelter to the swineherds 
and woodwards who had charge of their lord's pro- 
perty in the woodlands. The great tree-covered 
region of Selwood still divided Wessex into two 
halves ; the forest of the Chilterns still spread close 
to the walls of London ; the Peakland was still over- 
grown by an inaccessible thicket ; and the long 
central ridge between Yorkshire and Scotland was 
still shadowed by primaeval oaks, pinewoods, and 
beeches. Agriculture continued to be confined to 
the alluvial bottoms, and had nowhere as yet invaded 
the uplands, or even the stiffer and drier lowland 
regions, such as the Weald of Kent or the forests of 
Arden and Elmet. 

Only two elements broke the monotony of these 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 1 55 

self-sufficing agricultural communities. Those ele- 
ments were the monasteries and the towns. 

A large part of the soil of England was owned by 
the monks. They now possessed considerable build- 
ings, with stone churches of some pretensions, in which 
service was conducted with pomp and impressiveness. 
The tiny chapel of St. Lawrence, at Bradford-on-Avon, 
forms the best example of this primitive Romanesque 
architecture now surviving in England. Around the 
monasteries stretched their well-tilled lands, mostly 
reclaimed from fen or forest, and probably more 
scientifically cultivated than those of the neighbouring 
manors. Most of the monks were skilled in civilised 
handicrafts, introduced from the more cultivated con- 
tinent. They were excellent ecclesiastical metal- 
workers ; many of them were architects, who built in 
rude imitation of Romanesque models ; and others 
were designers or illuminators of manuscripts. The 
books and charters of this age are delicately and 
minutely wrought out, though not with all the artistic 
elaboration of later mediaeval work. The art of 
painting (almost always in miniature) was consider- 
ably advarced, the figures being well drawn, in rather 
stiff but not unlifelike attitudes, though perspective 
is very imperfectly understood, and hardly ever at- 
tempted. Later Anglo-Saxon architecture, such as 
that of Eadward's magnificent abbey church at West- 
minster (afterwards destroyed by Henry III. to make 
way for his own building), was not inferior to con- 
tinental workmanship. All the arts practised in the 
abbeys were of direct Roman origin, and most of the 



156 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

words relating to them are immediately derived from 
the Latin. This is t"he case even with terms relating 
to such common objects as candle^ pen, wine, and oil. 
Names of weights, measures, coins, and other exact 
quantitative ideas are also derived from Roman 
sources. Carpenters, smiths, bakers, tanners, and 
millers, were usually attached to the abbeys. Thus, 
in many cases, as at Glastonbury, Peterborough, 
Ripon, Beverley, and Bury St, Edmunds, the mon- 
astery grew into the nucleus of a considerable town, 
though the development of such towns is more marked 
after than before the Norman Conquest. As a whole, 
it was by means of the monasteries, and especially of 
their constant interchange of inmates with the con- 
tinent, that England mainly kept up the touch with 
the southern civilisation. There alone was Latin, the 
universal medium of continental intercommunication, 
taught and spoken. There alone were books written, 
preserved, and read. Through the Church alone was 
an organisation kept up in direct communication 
with the central civilising agencies of Italy and the 
south. And while the Church and the monasteries 
thus preserved the connection with the continent, 
they also formed schools of culture and of industrial 
arts for the country itself. At the abbeys bells were 
cast, glass manufactured, buildings designed, gold 
and silver ornaments wrought, jewels enamelled, and 
unskilled labour organised by the most trained intelli- 
gence of the land. They thus remained as they had 
begun, homes and retreats for those exceptional 
minds which were capable of carrying on the arts 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 1 57 

and the knowledge of a dying civilisation across the 
gulf of predatory barbarism which separates the arti- 
ficial culture of Rome from the industrial culture of 
modern Europe. 

The towns were few and relatively unimportant, 
built entirely of wood (except the churches), and very 
liable to be burnt down on the least excuse. In con- 
sidering them we must dismiss from our minds the 
ideas derived from our own great and complex organis- 
ation, and bring ourselves mentally into the attitude 
of a simple agricultural people, requiring little beyond 
what was produced on each man's own farm or petty 
holding. Such people are mainly fed from their own 
corn and meat, mainly clad from their own homespun 
wool and linen. A little specialisation of function, 
however, already existed. Salt was procured from 
the wyches or pans of the coast, and also from the 
inland wyches or brine wells of Cheshire and the 
midland counties. Such names as Nantwich, Middle- 
wych, Bromwich, and Droitwich, still preserve the 
memory of these early saltworks. Iron was mined 
in the Forest of Dean, around Alcester, and in the 
Somersetshire district. The city of Gloucester had 
six smiths' forges in the days of Eadward the Confessor, 
and paid its tax to the king in iron rods. Lead was 
found in Derbyshire, and was largely employed for 
roofing churches. Cloth-weaving was specially carried 
on at Stamford; but as a rule it is probable that every 
district supplied its own clothing. English merchants 
attended the great fair at St. Denys, in France, much 
as those of Central Asia now attend the fair at 



158 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Kandahar ; and madder seems to have been bought 
there for dyeing cloth. In Kent, Sussex, and East 
Anglia, herring fisheries already produced considerable 
results. With these few exceptions, all the towns 
were apparently mere local centres of exchange for 
produce, and small manufactured wares, Hke the 
larger villages or bazaars of India in our own time. 
Nevertheless, there was a distinct advance towards 
urban life in the later Anglo-Saxon period. Baeda 
mentions very few towns, and most of those were 
waste. By the date of the Conquest there were 
many, and their functions were such as befitted a 
more diversified national life. Communications had 
become far greater ; and arts or trade had now to 
some extent speciaHsed themselves in special places. 

A list of the chief early English towns may possibly 
seem to give too much importance to these very 
minor elements of English life ; yet one may, perhaps, 
be appended with due precaution against misappre- 
hension. 

The capital, if any place deserved to oe so called 
under the perambulating early EngHsh dynasty, was 
Winchester (Wintan-ceaster), with its old and new 
minsters, containing the tombs of the West-Saxon 
kings. It possessed a large number of craftsmen, 
doubtless dependant ultimately upon the court j and 
it was relatively a place of far greater importance 
than at any later date. 

Thechief ports were London (Lundenbyrig), situated 
at the head of tidal navigation on the Thames ; and 
Bristol (Bricgestow) and Gloucester (Gleawan-ceaster), 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 159 

similarly placed on the Avon and Severn. These 
towns were convenient for early shipping because of 
their tidal position, at an age when artificial harbours 
were unknown. They were the seat of the export 
traffic in slaves and the import traffic in continental 
goods. Before Alfred's reign the carrying trade bv 
sea seems to have been in the hands of the Frisian 
skippers and slave-dealers, who stood to the English 
in the same relation as the Arabs now stand to the 
East African and Central African negroes ; but after 
the increased attention paid to shipbuilding during 
the struggle with the Danes, English vessels began to 
engage in trade on their own account. London must 
already have been the largest and richest town in the 
kingdom. Even in Baeda's time it was " the mart of 
many nations, resorting to it by sea and land." It 
seems, indeed, to have been a sort of merchant com- 
monwealth, governed by its own port reeve, and it 
made its own dooms, which have been preserved to 
the present day. From the Roman time onward, the 
position of London as a great free commercial town 
was probably uninterrupted. 

York (Eoforwic), the capital of the North, had its 
own archbishop and its Danish internal organisation. 
It seems to have been always an important and con- 
siderable town, and it doubtless possessed the same 
large body of handicraftsmen as Winchester, During 
the doubtful period of Danish and English struggles 
the archbishop apparently exercised quasi-royal au- 
thority over the English burghers themselves. 

Among the cathedral towns the most important 



l6o ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

were Canterbury (Cant-wara-byrig), the old capital of 
Kent and metropolis of all England, which seems to 
have contained a relatively large trading population ; 
Dorchester, in Oxfordshire, first the royal city of the 
West Saxons, and afterwards the seat of the exiled 
bishopric of Lincoln ; Rochester (Hrofes-ceaster), the 
old capital of the West Kentings, and seat of their 
bishop : and Worcester (Wigorna-ceaster), the chief 
town of the Huiccii. Of the monastic towns the chief 
were Peterborough (Burh), Ely (Elig), and Glaston- 
bury (Glaestingabyrig). Bath, Amesbury, Colchester, 
Lincoln, Chester, and other towns of Roman origin 
were also important. Exeter, the old capital of the 
West Welsh, situated at the tidal head of the Exe, had 
considerable trade. Oxford was a place of traffic and 
a fortified town. Hastings, Dover, and the other 
south-coast ports had some communications with 
France. The only other places of any note were 
Chippenham, Bensington, and Aylesbury ; North- 
ampton and Southampton ; Bamborough ; the for- 
tified posts built by Eadward and ^thelfla^d ; and 
the Danish boroughs of Bedford, Derby, Leicester, 
Stamford, Nottingham, and Huntingdon. The 
Witena-gemots and the synods took place in any town, 
irrespective of size, according to royal convenience. 
But as early as the days of Cnut, London was begin- 
ning to be felt as the real centre of national life : 
and Eadward the Confessor, by founding Westminster 
Abbey, made it practically the home of the kings. 
The Conqueror "wore his crown on Eastertide at 
Winchester ; on Pentecost at Westminster ; and on 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE. l6] 

Midwinter at Gloucester :" which probably marks the 
relative position of the three towns as the chief places 
in the old West Saxon realm at least. Under ^Ethel- 
stan, London had eight moneyers or mint-masters, 
while Winchester had only six, and Canterbury seven. 

As regards the arts and traffic in the towns, they 
were chiefly carried on by guilds, which had their 
origin, as Dr. Brentano has shown with great proba- 
bility, in separate families, who combined to keep up 
their own trade secrets as a family affair. In time, 
however, the guilds grew into regular organisations, 
having their own code of rules and laws, many of 
which (as at Cambridge, Exeter, and Abbotsbury) we 
still possess. It is possible that the families of crafts- 
men may at first have been Romanised Welsh 
inhabitants of the cities ; for all the older towns — 
London, Canterbury, York, Lincoln, and Rochester 
— were almost certainly inhabited without interruption 
from the Roman period onward. But in any case the 
guilds seem to have grown out of family compacts, 
and to have retained always the character of close 
corporations. There must have been considerable divi- 
sion of the various trades even before the Conquest, and 
each trade must have inhabited a separate quarter ; 
for we find at Winchester, or elsewhere, in the reign 
of ^thelred, Fellmonger, Horsemonger, Fleshmonger, 
Shield wright, Shoewright, Turner, and Salter Streets. 

The exact amount of the population of England 
cannot be ascertained, even approximately ; but we 
may obtain a rough approximation from the estimates 
based upon Domesday Book. It seems probable that 



1 62 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

at the end of the Conqueror's reign, England con- 
tained 1,800,000 souls. Allowing for the large num- 
ber of persons introduced at the Conquest, and for 
the natural increase during the unusual peace in the 
reigns of Cnut, of Eadward the Confessor, and, above 
all, of William himself, we may guess that it could 
not have contained more than a million and a quarter 
in the days of Eadgar. London may have had a 
population of some 10,000; Winchester and York 
of 5,000 each ; certainly that of York at the date of 
Domesday could not have exceeded 7,000 persons, 
and we know that it contained 1,800 houses in the 
time of Eadward the Confessor. 

The organisation of the country continued on the 
lines of the old constitution. But the importance of 
the simple freeman had now quite died out, and the 
gemot was rather a meeting of the earls, bishops, 
abbots, and wealthy landholders, than a real assembly 
of the people. The sub-divisions of the kingdom 
were now pretty generally conterminous with the 
modern counties. In Wessex and the east the 
counties are either older kingdoms, like Kent, Sussex, 
and Essex ; or else tribal divisions of the kingdom, 
like Dorset, Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey. 
In Mercia, the recovered country is artificially mapped 
out round the chief Danish burgs, as in the case of 
Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, North- 
amptonshire, and Leicestershire, where the county 
town usually occupies the centre of the arbitrary 
shire. In Northumbria it is divided into equally 
artificial counties by the rivers. Beneath the counties 



THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 1 63 

Stood the older organisation of the hundred, and 
beneath that again the primitive unit of the township, 
known on its ecclesiastical side as the parish. In the 
reign of Eadgar, England seems to have contained 
about 3,000 parish churches. 



M 3 



1 64 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



THE DECADENCE. 



The death of Dunstan was the signal for the break- 
ing down of the artificial kingdom which he had held 
together by the mere power of his solitary organising 
capacity, ^thelred, the son of Eadgar (who suc- 
ceeded after the brief reign of his brother Eadward), 
lost hopelessly all hold over the Scandinavian north. 
At the same time, the wicking incursions, intermitted 
for nearly a century, once more recommenced with 
the same vigour as of old. Even before Dunstan's 
death, in 980, the pirates ravaged Southampton, 
killing most of the townsfolk ; and they also pillaged 
Thanet, while another host overran Cheshire. In the 
succeeding year, " great harm was done in Devonshire 
and in Wales ;" and a year later again, London was 
burnt and Portland ravaged. In 985, ^thelred, the 
Unready, as after ages called him, from his lack of 
rede or counsel, quarrelled with ^Ifric, ealdormen of 
the Mercians, whom he drove over sea. The breach 
between Mercia and Wessex was thus widened, and 
as the Danish attacks continued without interruption 
the redeless king soon found himself comparatively 
isolated in his own paternal dominions. Northum- 
bria, under its earl, Uhtred (one of the house of 



THE DECADENCE. 1 65 

Bamborough), and the Five Burgs under their Danish 
leaders, acted ahnost independently of Wessex 
throughout the whole of ^thelred's reign. In 991 
Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, advised that the 
Danes should be bought off by a payment of ten 
thousand pounds, an enormous sum ; but it was raised 
somehow and duly paid. In 992, the command of 
a naval force, gathered from the merchant craft of 
the Thames, was entrusted to ^Ifric, who had been 
recalled; and the Mercian leader went over on the eve of 
an engagement at London to the side of the enemy. 
Bamborough was stormed and captured with great 
booty, and the host sailed up Humber mouth. There 
they stood in the midst of the old Danish kingdom, 
and found the leading men of Northumbria and 
Lindsey by no means unfriendly to their invasion. In 
fact, the Danish north was now far more ready to 
(N'elcome the kindred Scandinavian than the West 
Saxon stranger, ^thelred's realm practically shrank 
at once to the narrow limits of Kent and Wessex. 

The Danes, however, were by no means content 
even with these successes. Olaf Tryggvesson, king 
of Norway, and Swegen Forkbeard,^ king of Den- 
mark, fell upon England. The era of mere plun- 
dering expeditions and of scattered colonisation 
had ceased ; the era of political conquest had now 
begun. They had determined upon the complete 
subjugation of all England. In 994 Olaf and Swegen 
attacked London with 94 ships, but were put to 

See Mr. York-Powell's '• Scandinavian Britain.'' 



1 66 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

flight by a gallant resistance of the townsmen, who 
did " more harm and evil than ever they weened that 
any burghers could do them." Thence the host sailed 
away to Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire, burning 
and slaying all along the coast as they went, 
^thelred and his witan bought them off again, with 
the immense tribute of sixteen thousand pounds. The 
host accepted the terms, but settled down for the 
winter at Southampton — a sufficient indication of their 
intentions — within easy reach of Winchester itself; 
and there " they fed from all the West Saxons' land." 
^thelred was alarmed, and sent to Olaf, who con- 
sented to meet him at Andover. There the king 
received him " with great worship," and gifted him 
with kinglike gifts, and sent him away with a promise 
never again to attack England. Olaf kept his word, 
and returned no more. But still Swegen remained, 
and went on pillaging Devonshire and Cornwall, 
wending into Tamar mouth as far as Lidford, where 
his men "burnt and slew all that they found." 
Thence they betook themselves to the Frome, and so 
up into Dorset, and again to Wight. In 999, on the 
eve of doomsday as men then thought, they sailed up 
Thames and Medway, and attacked Rochester. The 
men of Kent stoutly fought them, but, as usual, 
without assistance from other shires ; and the Danes 
took horses, and rode over the land, almost ruining 
all the West Kentings. The king and his witan 
resolved to send against them a land fyrd and a ship 
fyrd or raw levy. But the spirit of the West Saxons was 
broken, and though the craft were gathered together, 



THE DECADENCE. 1 67 

yet in the end, as the Chronicle plaintively puts it, 
"neither ship fyrd nor land fyrd wrought anything save 
toil for the folk, and the emboldening of their foes." 
So, year after year, the endless invasion dragged on 
its course, and everywhere each shire of Wessex 
fought for itself against such enemies as happened to 
attack it. At last, in the year 1002, ^Ethelred once 
more bought off the fleet, this time with 24,000 
pounds ; and some of the Danes obtained leave to 
settle down in Wessex. But on St. Brice's day, the 
king treacherously gave orders that all Danes in the 
immediate English territory should be massacred. 
The West Saxons rose on the appointed night, and 
slew every one of them, including Gunhild, the sister 
of King Swegen, and a Christian convert. It was a 
foolhardy attempt. Swegen fell at once upon Wessex, 
and marched up and down the whole country, for two 
years. He burnt Wilton and Sarum, and then sailed 
round to Norwich, where Ulfkytel, of East Anglia, 
gave him '* the hardest hand-play " that he had ever 
known in England. A year of famine intervened ; 
but in 1006 Swegen returned again, harrying and 
burning Sandwich. All autumn the West Saxon fyrd 
waited for the enemy, but in the end "it came to 
naught more than it had oft erst done." The host 
took up quarters in Wight, marched across Hants and 
Berks to Reading, and burned Wallingford. Thence 
they returned with their booty to the fleet, by the 
very walls of the royal city. " There might the 
Winchester folk behold an insolent host and fearless 
wend past their gate to sea." The king himself had 



1 68 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

fled into Shropshire. The tone of utter despair with 
which the Chronicle narrates all these events is the 
best measure of the national degradation. " There 
was so muckle awe of the host," says the annalist, 
" that no man could think how man could drive them 
from this earth or hold this earth against them ; for 
that they had cruelly marked each shire of Wessex 
with burning and with harrying." The English had 
sunk into hopeless misery, and were only waiting for 
a strong rule to rescue them from their misery. 

The strong rule came at last. Thorkell, a Danish 
jarl, marched all through Wessex, and for three years 
more his host pillaged everywhere in the South. In 
loii, they killed ^Ifheah, the archbishop of Canter- 
bury, at Greenwich. When the country was wholly 
weakened, Swegen turned southward once more, this 
time with all Northumbria and Mercia at his back. 
In 1013 he sailed round to Humber mouth, and 
thence up the Trent, to Gainsborough. "Then Earl 
Uhtred and all Northumbrians soon bowed to him, 
and all the folk in Lindsey ; and sithence the folk of 
the Five Burgs, and shortly after, all the host by 
north of Watling-street ; and men gave him hostages 
of each shire." Swegen at once led the united army 
into England, leaving his son Cnut in Denalagu with 
the ships and hostages. He marched to Oxford, 
which received him ; then to the royal city of Win- 
chester, which made no resistance. At London 
^thelred was waiting ; and for a time the town held 
out. So Swegen marched westward, and took Bath. 
There, the thegns of the Welsh-kin counties — Somer- 



THE DECADENCE. I 69 

set, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall — bowed to him 
and gave him hostages. " When he had thus fared, 
he went north to his ships, and all the folk held him 
then as full king." London itself gave way. ^thel- 
red fled to Wight, and thence to Normandy. He 
had married Ymma, the daughter of Richard the 
Fearless ; and he now took refuge with her brother, 
Richard the Good. 

Next year Swegen died, and the West Saxon witan 
sent back for ^thelred. No lord was dearer to them, 
they said, than their lord by kin. But the host had 
already chosen Cnut; and the host had a stronger 
claim than the witan. For two years ^thelred carried 
on a desultory war with the intruders, and then died, 
leaving it undecided. His son Eadmund, nicknamed 
Ironside, continued the contest for a few months ; but 
in the autumn of 1016 he died — poisoned, the Eng- 
lish said, by Cnut — and Cnut succeeded to undis- 
puted sway. He at once assumed Wessex as his own 
peculiar dominion, and the political history of the 
English ends for two centuries. Their social life 
went on, of course^ as ever ; but it was the life of a 
people in strict subjection to foreign rulers — Danish, 
Norman, or Angevin. The story of the next twenty- 
five years at least belongs to the chronicles of Scan- 
dinavian Britain. 

At the end of that time, however, there was a 
slight reaction. Cnut and his sons had bound the 
kingdom roughly into one ; and the death of Hartha- 
cnut left an opportunity for the return of a descendant 
of ^Jfred. But the English choice fell upon one 



ryo ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

who was practically a foreigner. Eadward, son ot 
^thelred by Ymma of Normandy, had lived in his 
mother's country during the greater part of his life. 
Recalled by Earl Godwine and the witan, he came 
back to England a Norman, rather than an English- 
man. The administration remained really in the 
hands of Godwine himself, and of the Danish or 
Danicised aristocracy. But Mercia and Northumbria 
still stood apart from Wessex, and once procured the 
exile of Godwine himself The great earl returned, 
however, and at his death passed on his power to his 
son Harold, a Danicised Englishman of great rough 
ability, such as suited the hard times on which he was 
cast. Harold employed the lifetime of Eadward, who 
was childless, in preparing for his own succession. 
The king died in 1066, and Harold was quietly chosen 
at once by the witan. He was the last Englishman 
who ever sat upon the throne of England. 

The remaining story belongs chiefly to the annals 
of Norman Britain. Harold was assailed at once 
from either side. On the north, his brother Tostig, 
whom he had expelled from Northumbria, led against 
him his namesake, Harold Hardrada, king of Norway. 
On the south, William of Normandy, Ead ward's 
cousin, claimed the right to present himself to the 
English electors. Eadward's death, in fact, had 
broken . up the temporary status, and left England 
once more a prey to barbaric Scandinavians from 
Denmark, or civilised Scandinavians from Normandy. 
The English themselves had no organisation which 
could withstand either, and no national unity to pro- 



THE DECADENCE. I7I 

mote such organisation in future. Harold of Norway 
came first, landing in the old Danish stronghold of 
Northumbria ; and the English Harold hurried north- 
ward to meet him, with his little body of house-carls, 
aided by a large fyrd which he had hastily col- 
lected to use against William. At Stamford-bridge 
he overthrew the invaders with great slaughter, 
Harold Hardrada and Tostig being amongst the 
slain. Meanwhile, William had crossed to Pevensey, 
and was ravaging the coast. Harold hurried south- 
ward, and met him at Senlac, near Hastings. After 
a hard day's fight, the Normans were successful, and 
Harold fell. But even yet the English could not 
agree among themselves. In this crisis of the national 
fate, the local jealousies burnt up as fiercely as ever 
While William was marching upon London, the 
witan were quarrelling and intriguing in the city over 
the succession. •'' Archbishop Ealdred and the towns- 
men of London would have Eadgar Child," — a grand- 
son of Eadmund Ironside — " for king, as was his 
right by kin." But Eadwine and Morkere, the repre- 
sentatives of the great Mercian family of Leofric, had 
hopes that they might turn William's invasion to their 
own good, and secure their independence in the 
north by allowing Wessex to fall unassisted into his 
hands. After much shuffling, Eadgar was at last 
chosen for king. " But as it ever should have be( n 
the forwarder, so was it ever, from day to day, slower 
and worse." No resistance was organised. In the 
midst of all this turmoil, the Peterborough Chroni- 
cler is engaged in narrating the petty affairs of his 



172 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

own abbey, and the question which arose through 
the application made to Eadgar for his consent to the 
appointment of an abbot. In such a spirit did the 
English meet an invasion from the stoutest and best 
organised soldiery in Europe. William marched on 
without let or hindrance, and on his way, the Lady — 
the Confessor's widow — surrendered the royal city of 
Winchester into his hands. The duke reached the 
Thames, burnt Southwark, and then made a detour 
to cross the river at Wallingford, whence he proceeded 
into Hertfordshire, thus cutting off Eadwine and 
Morkere in London from their earldoms. The Mer- 
cian and Northumbrian leaders being determined to 
hold their own at all hazards, retreated northward ; 
and the English resistance crumbled into pieces. 
Eadgar, the rival king, with Ealdred, the archbishop, 
and all the chief men of London, came out to meet 
William, and "bowed to him for need." The 
Chronicler can only say that it was very foolish they 
had not done so before. A people so helpless, so 
utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, de- 
served to undergo a severe training from the hard task- 
masters of Romance civiHsation. The nation remained, 
but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled 
in the stern school of the conquerors. For awhile, 
it is true, William governed England like an English 
king ; but the constant rebellion and faithlessness of 
his new subjects drove him soon to severer measures ; 
and the great insurrection of 1068, with its results, 
put the whole country at his feet in a very different 
sense from the battle of Senlac. For a hundred and 



THE DECADENCE. >73 

fifty years, the English people remained a mere race 
of chapmen and serfs; and the English language 
died down meanwhile into a servile dialect. When 
the native stock emerges again into the full light of 
history, by the absorption 'of the Norman conquerors 
in the reign of John, it reappears with all the super- 
added culture and organisation of the Romance 
nationalities. The Conquest was an inevitable step 
in the work of severing England from the barbarous 
North, and binding it once more in bonds of union 
with the civilised South. It was the necessary 
undoing of the Danish conquest ; more still, it was 
an inevitable step in the process whereby England 
itself was to begin its unified existence by the final 
breaking down of the barriers which divided Wessex 
from Mercia, and Mercia from Northumbria. 



174 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XVIII, 

THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 

A DESCRIPTION of Anglo-Saxon Britain, howcvei 
brief, would not be complete without some account of 
the English language in its earliest and purest form. 
But it would be impossible within reasonable limits to 
give anything more than a short general statement of 
the relation which the old English tongue bears to 
the kindred Teutonic dialects, and of the main 
differences which mark it off from our modern sim- 
plified and modified speech. All that can be at- 
tempted here is such a broad outline as may enable 
the general reader to grasp the true connexion 
between modern English and so-called Anglo-Saxon, 
on the one hand, as well as between Anglo-Saxon 
itself and the parent Teutonic language on the other. 
Any full investigation of grammatical or etymological 
details would be beyond the scope of this little 
volume. 

The tongue spoken by the Engfish and Saxons at 
the period of their invasion of Britain was ^n almost 
unmixed Low Dutch dialect. Originally derived, of 
course, from the primitive Aryan language, it had 
already undergone those changes which are summed 
up in what is known as Grimm's Law. The principal 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 



175 



consonants in the old Aryan tongue had been regu- 
larly and slightly altered in certain directions; and 
these alterations have been carried still further in the 
allied High German language. Thus the original 
word for father^ which closely resembled the Latin 
pater^ becomes in early English or Anglo-Saxon/^^/^r, 
and in modern High German vater. So, again, among 
the numerals, our tivo, in early English tzva, answers 
to Latin duo and modern High German zwei\ while 
our three, in old English threo^ answers to Latin tres, 
and modern High German drei. So far as these per- 
mutations are concerned, Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin 
may be regarded as most nearly resembling the 
primitive Aryan speech, and with them the Celtic 
dialects mainly agree. From these, the English 
varies one degree, the High German two. The fol- 
lowing table represents the nature of such changes 
approximately for these three groups of languages : — 



Greek, Sanscrit, 
Latin, Celtic 


p. 


b. 


f. 


t. 


d. 


th. 


k. 


g- 


ch. 


Gothic, English, 
Low Dutch... 


f. 


P- 


b. 


th. 


t. 


d. 


ch. 


k. 


g- ' 


High German... 


b. 


f. 


p. 


d. 


th. 


t. 


g- 


ch. 


k. 



In practice, several modifications arise; for example, 
the law is only true for old High German, and that 
only approximately, but its general truth may be 
accepted as governing most individual cases. 

Judged by this standard, English forms a dialect 
of the Low Dutch branch of the Aryan language, 



176 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN 

together with Frisian, modern Dutch, and the Scan- 
dinavian tongues. Within the group thus restricted 
its affinities are closest with Frisian and old Dutch, 
less close with Icelandic and Danish. While the 
English still lived on the shores of the Baltic, it is 
probable that their language was perfectly intelligible 
to the ancestors of the people who now inhabit 
Holland, and who then spoke very slightly different 
local dialects. In other words, a single Low Dutch 
speech then apparently prevailed from the mouth of 
the Elbe to that of the Scheldt, with small local 
variations ; and from this speech the Anglo-Saxon 
and the modern English have developed in one 
direction, while the Dutch has developed in another, 
the Frisian dialect long remaining intermediate 
between them. Scandinavian ceased, perhaps, to be 
intelligible to Englishmen at an earlier date, the old 
Icelandic being already marked off from Anglo- 
Saxon by strong peculiarities, while modern Danish 
differs even more widely from the spoken English of 
the present day. 

The relation of Anglo-Saxon to modern English 
is that of direct parentage, it might almost be said of 
absolute identity. The language of Beowulf and of 
yElfred is not, as many people still imagine, a 
different language from our own ; it is simply EngHsh 
in its earliest and most unmixed form. What we 
commonly call Anglo-Saxon, indeed, is more EngUsh 
than what we commonly call English at the present 
day. The first is truly English, not only in its 
structure and grammar, but also in the whole of its 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 177 

vocabulary : the second, though also truly Ene^lish in 
its structure and grammar, contains a large number, 
of Latin, Greek, and Romance elements in its vo- 
cabulary. Nevertheless, no break separates us from 
the original Low Dutch tongue spoken in the marsh 
lands of Sleswick. The English of Beowulf grows 
slowly into the English of Alfred, into the English of 
Chaucer, into the English of Shakespeare and Milton, 
and into the English of Macaulay and Tennyson. 

Old words drop out from time to time, old 
grammatical forms die away or become obliterated, 
new names and verbs are borrowed, first from the 
Norman-French at the Conquest, then from the 
classical Greek and Latin at the Renaissance ; but 
the continuity of the language remains unbroken, 
and its substance is still essentially the same as at 
the beginning. The Cornish, the Irish, and to some 
extent the Welsh, have left off speaking their native 
tongues, and adopted the language of the dominant 
Teuton ; but there never was a time when English- 
men left off speaking Anglo-Saxon and took to 
English, Norman-French, or any other form of 
speech whatsoever. 

An illustration may serve to render clearer this 
fundamental and important distinction. If at the 
present day a body of Englishmen were to settle in 
China, they might learn and use the Chinese names 
for many native plants, animals, and manufactured 
articles ; but however many of such words they 
adopted into their vocabulary, their language would 
still remain essentially English. A visitor from 

N 



lyS ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

England would have to learn a number of unfaniiliat 
words, but he would not have to learn a new lan- 
guage. If, on the other hand, a body of Frenchmen 
were to settle in a neighbouring Chinese province, 
and to adopt exactly the same Chinese words, their 
language would still remain essentially French. The 
dialects of the two settlements would contain many 
words in common, but neither of them would be a 
Chinese dialect on that account. Just so, English 
since the Norman Conquest has grafted many foreign 
words upon the native stock ; but it still remains at 
bottom the same language as in the days of Eadgar. 

Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon differs so far in ex- 
ternals from modern English, that it is now necessary 
to learn it systematically with grammar and dic- 
tionary, in somewhat the same manner as one would 
learn a foreign tongue. Most of the words, indeed, 
are more or less familiar, at least so far as their roots 
are concerned ; but the inflexions of the nouns and 
verbs are far more complicated than those now in 
use : and many obsolete forms occur even in the 
vocabulary. On the other hand the idioms closely 
resemble those still in use ; and even where a root 
has now dropped out of use, its meaning is often 
immediately suggested by the cognate High German 
word, or by some archaic form preserved for us in 
Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton, as well as by oc- 
casional survival in the Lowland Scotch and other 
local dialects. 

English in its early form was an inflexional lan- 
guage ; that is to say, the mutual relations of nouns 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 1 79 

and of verbs were chiefly expressed, not by means of 
particles, such as of, to, by, and so forth, but by means 
of modifications either in the termination or in the 
body of the root itself The nouns were declined much 
as in Greek and Latin ; the verbs were conjugated 
in somewhat the same way as in modern French. 
Every noun had gender expressed in its form. 

The following examples will give a sufficient idea 
of the commoner forms of declension in the classical 
West Saxon of the time of yElfred. The pronuncia- 
tion has already been briefly explained in the preface 

Sing. Plur, 

(1.^ Non. Stan [a stone). Nom. stanas. 
Gen. stanes. Gen. stana. 

Dat. stane. Dat. stanum. 
Ace. Stan. Aec. stanas. 

This is the commonest declension for masculine 
nouns, and it has fixed the normal plural for the 
modern English. 





Sing. 




Plur. 


(2.) 


Nom. 


fot {afoot). 


Nom 


. fet. 




Gen. 


fotes. 




Gen, 


, fota. 




Dat. 


fet. 




Dat. 


fotum. 




Aec. 


fot. 




Ace. 


, fet. 


Hence i 


our modified 


plurals, 


such as 


feet, ti 


men. 














Sing. 




Plur. 


(3-) 


Nom. 


wudu {a 


wood). 


Nom, 


wuda. 




Gen. 


wuda. 




Gen. 


wuda. 




Dat. 


wuda. 




Dat. 


wudum. 




Ace. 


wudu. 




Ace. 


wuda. 



All these are for masculine nouns. 

N 2 



1 8c ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

The commonest feminine declension is as fol- 
lows : — 

Sing. Plur. 

(4.) Nom. ^\{vi{a gift). Nom. gifa. 

Ge7i. gife. Gen. gifena. 

Dat, gife. Dat. gifum. 

Ace. gife. Ace. gifa. 

Less frequent is the modified form : 

Sing. Plur. 

(5). No7n. boc [a book)'. Nom. bee. 

Gen. bee. Gen. boca. 

Dat. bee. Dat. bocum. 

Ace. boc. Ace. bee. 

Of neuters there are two principal declensions. 
The first has the plural in u ; the second leaves it 
unchanged. 

Sing. Plur. 

(6.) A^om. scip {a sAip). Nom. scipu. 
Gen. scipes. Gen. scipa. 

Dat. scipe. Dat. scipum. 

Aee. scip. Ace. scipu. 

Sing. Plur. 

(7,) No7n. hus [a Jiouse). Nom. bus. 

Gen. buses. Gen. husa. 

Dat. huse. Dat. husum. 

Ace. hus. Ace. hus. 

Hence our " collective " plurals, such as fish, deer, 
sheep, and trout. 

There is also a weak declension, much the same 
for all three genders, of which the masculine form 
runs as follows : — 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. t8i 

Sing. Plur. 

Norn, guma {a jnan). Nom. guman. 

Gen. guman. Gen. gumena 

Dat. guman. Dat. guman. 

Ace. guman. Ace. guman. 

Adjectives are declined throughout, as in Latin, 
through all the cases (including an instrumental), 
numbers, and genders. The demonstrative pronoun 
or definite article se (the) may stand as an example. 
Sing. 





Masc. Fein. 


Neut. 


Nom. 


se, seo, 


thset. 


Gen. 


thaes, thaere, 


thaes. 


Dat. 


tham, thaere, 


tham. 


Ace. 


thone, tha, 


thret. 


Inst. 


thy, thcere, 
Plur. 


thy. 




Masc. Fern. 


Neut. 




Nom. tha. 






Gen. thara. 






Dat. tham. 






Ace. tha. 






Inst. — 





Verbs are conjugated about as fully as in Latin. 
There are two principal forms : strong verbs, which 
form their preterite by vowel modification, as binde, 
pret. band; and weak verbs, which form it by the 
addition of ode or de to the root, as liifige, pret 
lufode ; hire, pret. /lirde. The present and preterit' 
of the first form are as follows : — 

IND. SUBJ. 

Pres, sing. i . binde. binde. 

2. bindest. binde. 

-J, bindeth. binde. 



l82 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



flur. 


I, 2, 


3. 


bindath. 


binden 


Pret. sing. 


1. 




band. 


bunde. 




2. 




bunde. 


bdnde. 




3- 




band. 


bunde. 


plur. 


I, 2, 


3. 


bundon. 


bunden. 



Both the grammatical forms and still more the 
orthography vary much from time to time, from place 
to place, and even from writer to writer. The forms 
used in this work are for the most part those em- 
ployed by West Saxons in the age of Alfred. 

A few examples of the language as written at three 
periods will enable the reader to form some idea of 
its relation to the existing type. The first passage 
cited is from King Alfred's translation of Orosius ; 
but it consists of the opening lines of a paragraph in- 
serted by the king himself from his own materials, 
and so affords an excellent illustration of his style in 
original English prose. The reader is recommended 
to compare it word for word with the parallel slightly 
modernised version, bearing in mind the inflexional 
terminations. 



Ohthere saede his hlaforde, 
^Ifrede cyninge, thset he 
ealra Northmonna northmest 
bude. He cwseth thaet he 
bude on thsem nde north- 
weardum with tba West-sas. 
He ssede theah thset thset land 
sie swithe lang north thonan ; 
ac hit is eall weste, buton on 
feawum stowum styccemselum 
wiciath Finnas on huntothe 



Othhere said to his lord, 
Alfred king, that he of all 
Northmen northmost abode. 
He quoth that he abode 
on the land northward against 
the West Sea. He said, 
though, that that land was 
[or extended] much north 
thence ; eke it is all waste, 
but [except that] on few stows 
[in a few places] piecemed 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 



^3 



OP wintra, and on sumera on 
tiscathe be thaere sse. He 
sxi\e thaet he set sumum cine 
wolde fandian hu longe thset 
land northryhte Irege, oththe 
hwcether renig monnbe noithan 
thsem westenne bude. Tha 
for he northryhte be tha8m 
lande : let him eahie weg 
thcet weste land on thoet steor- 
bord, and tha wid-sse on thret 
b^Ecbord thrie dagas. Tha 
wses he swa feor north swa tha 
hwsel-huntan firrest farath. 



dwelleth Finns, on hunting on 
winter, and on summer on 
fishing by the sea. He said 
that he at some time [on one 
occasion] would seek how long 
that land lay northright [due 
north], or whether any man by 
north of the waste abode. 
Then fore [fared] he north- 
right, by the land : left all the 
way that waste land on the 
starboard of him, and the wide 
sea on the backboard [port, 
French babordi three days. 
Then was he so far north as 
the whale - hunters furthest 
fareth. 



In this passage it is easy to see that the variations 
which make it into modern English are for the most 
part of a very simple kind. Some of the words are 
absolutely identical, as his, on, he, and, land, or north. 
Others, though differences of spelling mask the like- 
ness, are practically the same, as sce^ scede, cwceth, 
thcet, lang, for which we now write sea, said, quoth, 
that, long. A few have undergone contraction or 
alteration, as hlaford, now lord, cyning, now kiiig, 
and stcorbord, now starboard. Stow, a place, is now 
obsolete, except in local names ; styccemcelum, sticic- 
meal, has been Normanised into piecemeal. In 
other cases new terminations have been substituted 
for old ones ; huntath and fiscath are now replaced 
by hunting diVid. fishing ', while hunta has been super- 
seded by hu7iter. Only six words in the passage have 



184 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

died out wholly : buan^ to abide ipude) ; swithe^ very ; 
wician, to dwell ; cirr, an occasion ; fajidian, to en- 
quire (connected with find) ; and bcBcbordy port, which 
still survives in French from Norman sources. Dceg^ 
day, and cenig, any, show how existing English has 
softened the final g into a j. But the main difference 
which separates the modern passage from its ancient 
prototype is the consistent dropping of the gram- 
matical inflexions in hlaforde^ ^Ifrede, ealra, feawum^ 
and fa7idian^ where we now say, to his lord, of all^ 
in few ^ and to enquif-e. 

The next passage, from the old English epic of 
Beowulf shows the language in another aspect. 
Here, as in all poetry, archaic forms abound, and the 
syntax is intentionally involved. It is written in the 
old alliterative rhythm, described in the next chapter: — 

Beowulf mathelode beam Ecgtheowes ; 

Hwset ! we the thas sse-lac sunu Healfdenes 

Leod Scyldinga lustum brohton, 

Tires to tacne, the thu her to-locast. 

Ic thset un-softe ealdre gedigde 

Wigge under wretere, weorc genethde 

Earfothlice ; set rihte wses 

Guth getwsefed nymthe mec god scylde. 

Beowulf spake, the son of Ecgtheow : 
See ! We to thee this sea-gift, son of Healfdene, 

Prince of the Scyldings, joyfully have brought, 

For a token of glory, that thou here lookest on. 

That I unsoftly, gloriously accomplished, 

In war under water : the work I dared, 

With much labour : rightly was 

The battle divided, but that a god shielded me. 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 



185 



Or, to translate more prosaically : — 

" Beowulf, the son of Ecgtheow, addressed the 
meeting. See, son of Healfdene, Prince of the 
Scyldings ; we have joyfully brought thee this gift 
from the sea which thou beholdest, for a proof of our 
valour. I obtained it with difficulty, gloriously, 
fighting beneath the waves : I dared the task with 
great toil. Evenly was the battle decreed, but that a 
god afforded me his protection." 

In this short passage, many of the words are now 
obsolete : for example, mathelian^ to address an 
assembly (conciotiari) ; lac, a gift ; 7uig, war ; guth, 
battle ; and leod, a prince. Ge-digde, ge-nethde, 
and ge4w<^fed have the now obsolete particle ge-, 
which bears much the same sense as in High German. 
On the other hand, beam, a bairn ; sunu, a son ; s(b, 
sea ; tacen, a token ; wceter, water ; and weorc, work, 
still survive : as do the verbs to bring, to look, and to 
shield. Lust, pleasure, whence histum, joyfully, has 
now restricted its meaning in modern English, but 
retains its original sense in High German. 

A few lines from the " Chronicle " under the year 
1 137, during the reign of Stephen, will give an 
example of Anglo-Saxon in its later and corrupt 
form, caught in the act of passing into Chaucerian 
English : — 



This gaere for the King 
Stephan ofer sse to Nor- 
mandi ; and ther wes under 
fangen, forthi thaet hi wenden 
thaet lie sculde ben alsuic alse 



This year fared the King 
Stephen over sea to Nor- 
mandy^ and there he was 
accepted [received as duke] 
because that they weened 



i86 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN, 



the eom wses, and for he 
hadde get his tresor ; ac he 
todeld it and scatered sotlice. 
Micel hadde Henri king 
gadered gold and sylver, and 
na god ne dide men for his 
saule tharof. Tha the King 
Stephan to Englaland com, 
tha macod he his gadering 
set Oxeneford, and thar he 
nam the biscop Roger of 
Sereberi, and Alexander 
biscop of Lincoln, and the 
Canceler Roger, hise neves, 
and dide selle in prisun, til 
hi iafen up hire castles. 



that he should be just as his 
uncle was, and because he 
had got his treasure : but h^. 
to-dealt [distributed] and 
scattered it sot-like [fool- 
ishly], Muckle had King 
Henry gathered of gold and 
silver ; and man did no good 
for his soul thereof. When 
that King Stephan was come 
to England, then maked he 
his gathering at Oxford, and 
there he took the bishop 
Roger of Salisbury, and Alex- 
ander, bishop of Lincoln, and 
the Chancellor Roger, his 
nephew, and did them all in 
prison [put them in prison] 
till they gave up their castles. 



The following passage from ^^Ifric's Life of King 
Oswold, in the best period of early English prose, 
may perhaps be intelligible to modern readers by the 
aid of a few explanatory notes only. Mid means 
with ; while with itself still bears only the meaning 
of against : — 

" ^fter tham the Augustinus to Englalande becom, 
wses sum sethele cyning, Oswold ge-haten [hight or 
Lalled\ on North-hymbra-lande, ge-lyfed swithe on 
God. Se ferde [went] on his iugothe [youth] fram 
his freondum and magum [relations] to Scotlande on 
sse, and th^er sona wearth ge-fullod [baptised], and 
his ge-feran [companions] samod the mid him sithedon 
[journeyed]. Befwux tham wearth of-slagen [off-slain] 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 187 

Eadwine his earn [uncle], North-hymbra cyning, on 
Crist ge-lyfed, fram Brytta cyninge, Ceadwalla ge-ciged 
[called, named], and twegen his aefter-gengan binnan 
twam gearum [years] ; and se Ceadwalla sloh and to 
sceame tucode tha North-hymbran leode [people] 
fefter heora hlafordes fylle, oth thaet [until] Oswold 
se eadiga his yfelnysse adwsescte [extinguished]. 
Oswold him com to, and him cenlice [boldly] with 
feaht mid lytlum werode [troop], ac his geleafa [belief] 
hine ge-trymde [encouraged], and Crist him ge-fylste 
[helped] to his feonda [fiends, enemies] siege." 

It will be noticed in every case that the syntactical 
arrangement of the words in the sentences follows as 
a whole the rule that the governed word precedes 
the governing, as in Latin or High German, not vice 
imsa^ as in modern English. 

A brief list will show the principal modifications 
undergone by nouns in the process of modernisation. 
Stan^ stone ; STiaw, snow ; baft, bone. Crceft^ craft ; 
stcBf, staft'; bcec, back. Weg, way; dceg, day; 7icsgel. 
nail ; fugol, fowl. Gear, year ; geong, young. Finger, 
finger ; wintej', winter ; ford, ford. ^fcn, even ; 
niorgeti, morn. Monath, month; heofon, heaven; 
heafod, head. Fot, foot ; toth, tooth ; boc, book ; 
freond, friend. Modor, mother ; feeder, father ; dohtor, 
daughter. Sunu, son ; wiidu, wood ; cam, care ; 
detiu, dene (valley). Scip, ship ; cild, child ; ceorl, 
churl ; cy7in, kin ; ceald, cold. Wherever a word has 
not become wholly obsolete, or assumed a new termi- 
nation, {e.g., gifu, gift ; viorgen, morn-ing), it usually 
follows one or other of these analogies. 



1 88 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

The changes which the English language, as a 
whole, has undergone in passing from its earlier to 
its later form, may best be considered under the two 
heads of form and matter. 

As regards form or structure, the language has 
been simplified in three separate ways. First, the 
nouns and adjectives have for the most part lost their 
inflexions, at least so far as the cases are concerned. 
Secondly, the nouns have also lost their gettder. And 
thirdly, the verbs have been simplified m conjugation, 
weak preterites being often substituted for strong 
ones, and differential terminations largely lost. On 
the other hand, the plural of nouns is still distin- 
guished from the singular by its termination in s, 
which is derived from the first declension of Anglo- 
Saxon nouns, not as is often asserted, from the 
Norman-French usage. In other words, all plurals 
have been assimilated to this the commonest model ; 
just as in French they have been assimilated to the 
final s of the third declension in Latin. A few 
plurals of the other types still survive, such as men, 
geese, mice, sheep, deer, oxen, children and (dialecti- 
cally) peasen. To make up for this loss of inflexions, 
the language now employs a larger number of par- 
ticles, and to some extent, of auxiliaries. Instead of 
wines, we now say of a friend ; instead of wine, we 
now say to a friend ; and instead of winum^ we now 
say to friends. English, in short, has almost ceased 
to be inflexional and has become analytic. 

As regards matter or vocabulary, the language has 
lost in certain directions, and gained in others. It 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. P89 

has lost many old Teutonic roots, such as ivig^ war; 
rice, kingdom ; tungol, light ; with their derivatives, 
7vige7idy warrior ; rixiaii^ to rule ; tu7tgol-witega, 
astrologer; and so forth. The relative number of 
such losses to the survivals may be roughly gauged 
from the passages quoted above. On the other hand, 
the language has gained by the incorporation of many 
Romance words, shortly after the Norman Conquest, 
such as place, voice, judge, war, and royal. Some of 
these liave entirely superseded native old English 
words. Thus the Norman-French uncle, aunt, cousin, 
?iephew, and niece, have wholly ousted their Anglo- 
Saxon equivalents. In other instances the Romance 
words have enriched the language with symbols for 
really new ideas. This is still more strikingly the 
case with the direct importations from the classical 
Greek and Latin which began at the period of the 
Renaissance. Such words usually refer either to 
abstract conceptions for which the English language 
had no suitable expression, or to the accurate termi- 
nology of the advanced sciences. In every-day con- 
versation our vocabulary is almost entirely English ; 
in speaking or writing upon philosophical or scientific 
subjects it is largely intermixed with Romance and 
Graeco-Latin elements. On the whole, though it is 
to be regretted that many strong, vigorous or poetical 
old Teutonic roots should have been allowed to fall 
into disuse, it may safely be asserted that our gains 
have far more than outbalanced our losses in this 
respect. 

It must never be forgotten, however, that the whole 



tgo ANGLO-SAXOK BRITAIN, 

framework of our language still remains, in every 
case, purely English — that is to say, Anglo-Saxon or 
Low Dutch — however many foreign elements may 
happen to enter into its vocabulary. We can frame 
many sentences without using one word of Romance 
or classical origin : we cannot frame a single sentence 
without using words of English origin. The Author- 
ised Version of the Bible, " The Pilgrim's Progress," 
and such poems as Tennyson's " Dora," consist 
almost entirely of Teutonic elements. Even when 
the vocabulary is largely classical, as in Johnson's 
" Rasselas " and some parts of " Paradise Lost," the 
grammatical structure, the prepositions, the pronouns, 
the auxiliary verbs, and the connecting particles, are 
all necessarily and purely English. Two exam.ples 
will suffice to make this principle perfectly clear. In 
the first, which is the most familiar quotation from 
Shakespeare, all the words of foreign origin have been 
printed in italics : — 

To be, or not to be, — that is the question 

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 

The slings and arrows oi outrageous fortune ; 

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles^ 

And, by opposing^ end them? To die, — to sleep, — 

No more ; and, by a sleep, to say we end 

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks 

That flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation 

Devoutly to be wished. To die, — to sleep ; — 

To sleep ! perchance to dream : ay, there's the rub 

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 

Must give us pause ■ there's the respect 



THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 1^1 

'1 hat makes calamity of so long life ; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor s wrong, the proud man's couiuwely. 
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his qttietics make 
With a bare bodkin ? 

Here, out of 167 words, we find only 28 of foreign 
origin ; and even these are Englished in their termi- 
nations or adjuncts. Noble is Norman- French ; but 
the comparative nobler stamps it with the Teutonic 
mark. Oppose is Latin ; but the participle opposing 
is true English. Devout is naturalised by the native 
adverbial termination, devoutly. Oppressor's and 
despised take English inflexions. The formative 
elements, or, not, that, the, tn, and, by, we, and the 
rest, are all English. The only complete sentence 
which we could frame of wholly Latin words would 
be an imperative standing alone, as, " Observe," and 
even this would be English in form. 

On the other hand, we may take the following 
passage from Mr. Herbert Spencer as a specimen of 
the largely Latinised vocabulary needed for expressing 
the exact ideas of science or philosophy. Here also 
borrowed words are printed in italics : — 

" The constitution which we assign to this etherial 
inediu7fi, however, like the constitution we assign to 
solid substance, is ftecessarily an abstract of the i7n- 
pressions received from tangible bodies. The opposi- 
tion to pressure which a tangible body offers to us is 



192 ANGLOrSAXON BRITAIN 

not shown in one direction only, but in all directions ; 
and so likewise is its tenacity. Suppose countless lines 
radiating from its centre on every side, and it resists 
along each of these lines and coheres along each of 
these lines. Hence the constitution of those ultimate 
units through the instrumentality of which phenomena 
are interpreted. Be they ato77is of pojiderable matter 
or molecules of ether ^ the properties we conceive them 
to possess are nothing else than these perceptible 
properties idealised.^'' 

In this case, out of 122 words we find no less than 
46 are of foreign origin. Though this large proportion 
sufficiently shows the amount of our indebtedness to 
the classical languages for our abstract or specialised 
scientific terms, the absolutely indisputable nature of 
the English substratum remains clearly evident. The 
tongue which we use to-day is enriched by valuable 
loan words from many separate sources ; but it is 
still as it has always been, English and nothing else. 
It is the self-same speech with the tongue of the 
Sleswick pirates and the West Saxon over-lords. 



ANGLO-SAXON NOMENCLATURE. 1 93 



CHAPTER XIX. 

Anglo-Saxon Nomenclature. 

Perhaps nothing tends more to repel the modern 
English student from the early history of his country 
than the very unfamiliar appearance of the personal 
names which he meets before the Norman Conquest. 
There can be no doubt that such a shrinking from 
the first stages of our national annals does really 
exist; and it seems to be largely due to this very 
superficial and somewhat unphilosophical cause. 
Before the Norman invasion, the modern Englishman 
finds himself apparently among complete foreigners, 
in the ^thelwulfs, the Eadgyths, the Oswius, and 
the Seaxburhs of the Chronicle ; while he hails the 
Norman invaders, the Johns, Henrys, Williams, and 
Roberts, of the period immediately succeeding the 
conquest, as familiar English friends. The contrast 
can scarcely be better given than in the story told 
about ^thelred's Norman wife. Her name was 
Ymma, or Emma ; but the English of that time mur- 
mured against such an outlandish sound, and so the 
Eady received a new EngHsh name as ^Ifgifu. At 
the present day our nomenclature has changed so 
utterly that Emma sounds like ordinary English, while 
^Ifgifu sounds like a wholly foreign word. The 
incidental light thrown upon our history by the careful 
o 



194 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Study of personal names is indeed so valuable that a 
few remarks upon the subject seem necessary in order 
to complete our hasty survey of Anglo-Saxon Britain. 
During the very earliest period when we catch a 
glimpse of the English people on the Continent or in 
eastern Britain, a double system of naming seems to 
have prevailed, not wholly unlike our modern plan of 
Christian and surname. The clan name was appendea 
to the personal one. A man was apparently described 
as Wulf the Holting, or as Creoda the ^scing. 
The clan names were in many cases common to the 
English and the Continental Teutons. Thus we find 
Helsings in the English Helsington and the Swedish 
Helsingland ; Harlings in the English Harlingham 
and the Frisian Harlingen ; and Bleccings in the 
English Bletchingleyand the Scandinavian Bleckingen. 
Our Thyrings at Thorrington answer, perhaps, to the 
Thuringians; our Myrgings at Merrington to the 
Frankish Merwings or M erovingians ; our Waerings at 
Warrington to the Norse V^ringjar or Varangians. 
At any rate, the clan organization was one common to 
both great branches of the Teutonic stock, and it has 
left its mark deeply upon our modern nomenclature, 
both in England and in Germany. Mr. Kemble has 
enumerated nearly 200 clan names found in early 
English charters and documents, besides over 600 
others inferred from local names in England at the 
present day. Taking one letter of the alphabet alone, 
his list includes the Glsestings, Geddings, Gumenings, 
Gustings, Getings, Grundlings, Gildlings, and Gillings, 
from documentary evidence ; and the GaersingSj 



ANGLO SAXON NOMENCLATURE. 195 

Gestings, Geofonings, Goldings, and Garings, with 
many others, from the inferential evid n :e of existing 
towns and villages. 

The personal names of the earliest period are in 
many cases untranslateable— that is to say, as with 
the first stratum of Greek names, they bear no obvious 
meaning in the language as we know it. Others are 
names of animals or natural objects. Unlike the 
later historical cognomens, they each consist, as a 
rule, of a single element, not of two elements in com- 
position. Such are the names which we get in the 
narrative of the colonization and in the mythical 
genealogies; Hengest, Horsa, ^sc, ^lle, Cymen, 
Cissa, Bieda, M^gla; Ceol, Penda, Offa, Blecca ; 
Esla, Gewis, Wig, Brand, and so forth. A few of these 
names (such as Penda and Offa), are undoubtedly 
historical ; but of the rest, some seem to be etymo- 
logical blunders, like Port and Wihtgar ; others to be 
pure myths, like Wig and Brand; and others, again, 
to be doubtfully true, Hke Cerdic, Cissa, and Bieda, 
eponyms, perhaps, of Cerdices-ford, Cissan-ceaster, 
and Biedan-heafod. 

In the truly historical age, the clan system seems to 
have died out, and each person bore, as a rule, only a 
single personal name. These names are almost inva- 
riably compounded of two elements, and the elements 
thus employed were comparatively few in number 
Thus, we get the root cethel, noble, as the first half in 
^thelred, ^thelwulf, ^thelberht, ^thelstan, and 
^thelbald. Again, the root ead, rich, or powerful, 
occurs in Eadgar, Eadred, Eadward, Eadwine, and 
o 2 



196 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

Eadwulf. ^If, an elf, forms the prime element in 
Alfred, ^Ifric, ^Ifwine, ^Ifward, and ^Ifstan. 
These were the favourite names of the West-Saxon 
royal house ; the Northumbrian kings seem rather to 
have affected the syllable os^ divine, as in Oswald, 
Oswiu, Osric, Osred, and Oslaf. Wine^ friend, is a 
favourite termination found in y^scwine, Eadwine, 
^thelwine, Oswine, and ^Elfwine, whose meanings 
need no further explanation. Wulf appears as the 
first half in Wulfstan, Wulfric, Wulfred, and Wulf- 
here; while it forms the second half in ^thelwulf, 
Eadwulf, Ealdwulf, and Cenwulf. Beorht, berhf, or 
briht, bright, or glorious, appears in Beorhtric, Beorht- 
wulf, Brihtwald; ^thelberht, Ealdbriht, and Ead- 
byrht. Burh, a fortress, enters into many female 
names, as Eadburh, ^thelburh, Sexburh, and Wiht- 
burh. As a rule, a certain number of syllables seem 
to have been regarded as proper elements for forming 
personal names, and to have been combined some- 
what fancifully, without much regard to the resulting 
meaning. The following short list of such elements, 
in addition to the roots given above, will suffice to 
explain most of the names mentioned in this work. 

Helm : helmet. IVzg-: war. 

Gar : spear. Slan : stone. 

Gifn : gift. Eald : old, venerable. 

Hej'-e : army. Weard, ward: ward, protection, 

Sige: victory. Red: counsel. 

Cyne : royal. Ecg : edge, sword. 

Leof: dear. Theod : people, nation. 

By combining these elements with those already given 



ANGLO-SAXON NOMENCLATURE. I97 

most, of the royal or noble names in use in early 
England were obtained. 

With the people, however, it would seem that 
shorter and older forms were still in vogue. The 
following document, the original of which is printed 
in Kemble's collection, represents the pedigree of a 
serf, and is interesting, both as showing the sort of 
names in use among the servile class, and the care 
with which their family relationships were recorded, 
in order to preserve the rights of their lord. 

Dudda was a boor at Hatfield, and he had three daughters : 
one hight Deorwyn, the other Deorswith, the third Golde. 
And Wulflaf at Hatfield has Deorwyn to wife. ^Ifstan, at 
Tatchingworth, has Deorswith to wife : and Ealhstan, ^Ifstan's 
brother, has Golde to wife. There was a man hight Hwita, 
bee-master at Hatfield, and he had a daughter Tate, mother of 
VVulfsige, the bowman ; and Wulfsige's sister Lulle has Hehstan 
to wife, at Walden. Wifus and Dunne and Seoloce are inborn 
at Hatfield. Duding, son of Wifus, lives at Walden ; and 
Ceolmund, Dunne's son, also sits at Walden ; and ^thelheah, 
Seoloce's son, also sits at Walden. And Tate, Cenwold's sister. 
Mceg has to wife at Welgun ; and Eadhelm, Herethryth's son, 
has Tate's daughter to wife. Wserlaf, Wserstan's father, was a 
right serf at Hatfield ; he kept the grey swine there. 

In the west, and especially in Cornwall, the names 
of the serfs were mainly Celtic, — Griffith, Modred, 
Riol, and so forth, — as may be seen from the list of 
manumissions preserved in a mass-book at St. Petroc's, 
or Padstow. Elsewhere, however, the Celtic names 
seem to have dropped out, for the most part, with 
the Celtic language. It is true, we meet with cases 
of apparently Welsh forms, like Maccus, or Rum, 



198 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

even in purely Teutonic districts ; and some names, 
such as Cerdic and Ceadwalla, seem to have been 
borrowed by one race from the other : while such 
forms as Wealtheow and Waltheof are at least sug- 
gestive of British descent : but on the whole, the 
conquered Britons appear everywhere^ to have quickly 
adopted the names in vogue among their conquerors. 
Such names would doubtless be considered fashion- 
able, as was the case at a later date with those intro- 
duced by the Danes and the Normans. Even in 
Cornwall a good many English forms occur among 
the serfs : while in very Celtic Devonshire, English 
names were probably universal. 

The Danish Conquest introduced a number of 
Scandinavian names, especially in the North, the con- 
sideration of which belongs rather to a companion 
volume. They must be briefly noted here, however, 
to prevent confusion with the genuine English forms. 
Amongst such Scandinavian introductions, the com- 
monest are perhaps Harold, Swegen or Swend, Ulf, 
Gorm or Guthrum, Orm, Yric or Eric, Cnut, and 
Ulfcytel. During and after the time of the Danish 
dynasty, these forms, rendered fashionable by royal 
usage, became very general even among the native 
English. Thus Earl Godwine's sons bore Scandi- 
navian names ; and at an earlier period we even find 
persons, apparently Scandinavian, fighting on the 
English side against the Danes in East Anglia. 

But the sequel to the Norman Conquest shows us 
most clearly how the whole nomenclature of a nation 
may be entirely altered without any large change of 



ANGLO-SAXON NOMENCLATURE. 1 99 

race. Immediately after the Conquest the native 
English names begin to disappear, and in their place 
we get a crop of Williams, Walters, Rogers, Henries, 
Ralphs, Richards^ Gilberts, and Roberts. Most of 
these were originally High German forms, taken into 
Gaul by the Franks, borrowed from them by the 
Normans, and then copied by the English from their 
foreign lords. A few, however, such as Arthur, 
Owen, and Alan, were Breton Welsh. Side by side 
with these French names, the Normans introduced 
the Scriptural forms, John, Matthew, Thomas, Simon, 
Stephen, Piers or Peter, and James ; for though a 
few cases of Scriptural names occur in the earlier 
history — for example, St. John of Beverley and Daniel, 
bishop of the West Saxons — these are always borne 
by ecclesiastics, probably as names of religion. All 
through the middle ages, and down to very recent 
times, the vast majority of English men and women 
continued to bear these baptismal names of Norman 
introduction. Only two native English forms prac- 
tically survived — Edward and Edmund — owing to 
mere accidents of royal favour. They were the 
names of two great English saints, Eadward the 
Confessor and Eadmund of East Anglia; and 
Henry HI. bestowed them upon his two sons, 
Edward I. and Edmund of Lancaster. In this 
manner they became adopted into the royal and 
fashionable circle, and so were perpetuated to our 
own day. All the others died out in mediaeval 
times, while the few old forms now current, such as 
Alfred, Edgar. Athelstane, and Edwin, are mere 



200 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

artificial revivals of the two last centuries. If we 
were to judge by nomenclature alone, we might 
almost fancy that the Norman Conquest had wholly 
extinguished the English people. 

A few steps towards the adoption of surnames were 
taken "even before the Conquest. Titles of office 
were usually placed after the personal name, as 
Alfred King, Lilla Thegn, Wulfnoth Cild, ^Ifward 
Bishop, ^thelberht Ealdorman, and Harold Earl. 
Double names occasionally joccur, the second being a 
nickname or true surname, as Osgod Clapa, Benedict 
Biscop, Thurkytel Myranheafod, Godwine Bace, and 
<(^lfric Cerm. Trade names are also found, as 
Ecceard smith, or Godwig boor. Everywhere, but 
especially in the Danish North, patronymics were in 
common use ; for example, Harold Godwine's son, 
or Thored Gunnor's son. In all these cases we get 
surnames in the germ ; but their general and official 
adoption dates from after the Norman Conquest. 

Local nomenclature also demands a short explana- 
tion. Most of the Roman towns continued to be 
called by their Roman names : Londinium, Lunden, 
London ; Eburacum, Eoforwic, Eurewic, York ; 
Lindum Colonia, Lincolne, Lincoln. Often ceaster^ 
from casfrum^ was added : Gwent, Venta Belgarum, 
Wintan-ceaster, Winteceaster, Winchester; Isca, Exan- 
ceaster, Execestre, Exeter ; Corinium, Cyren-ceaster, 
Cirencester. Almost every place which is known to 
have had a name at the English Conquest retained 
that name afterwards, in a more or less clipped or 
altered form. Examples are Kent, Wight, Devon, 



ANGLO-SAXON NOMENCLATURE. 201 

Dorset ; Manchester, Lancaster, Doncaster, Leicester, 
Gloucester, Worcester, Colchester, Silchester, Uttox- 
eter, Wroxeter, and Chester ; Thames, Severn, Ouse, 
Don, Aire, Derwent, Swale, and Tyne. Even where 
the Roman name is now lost, as at Pevenj;ey, the old 
form was retained in Early English days ; for the 
" Chronicle " calls it Andredes-ceaster, that is to say, 
Anderida. So the old name of Bath is Akemannes- 
ceaster, deiived from the Latin A^tm. Cissan-ceaster, 
Chichester, forms an almost solitary exception. Can- 
terbury, or Cant-wara-byrig, was correctly known as 
Dwrovernum or Doroberna in Latin documents of 
the Anglo-Saxon period. 

On the other hand, the true English towns which 
grew up around the strictly English settlements, bore 
names of three sorts. The first were the clan villages, 
the /lams or f?/pis, such as Bccnesingatun, Bensington ; 
Snotingaham, Nottingham ; Glaestingabyrig, Glaston- 
bury ; and Waeringwica, Warwick. These have 
already been sufficiently illustrated ; and they were 
situated, for the most part, in the richest agricultural 
lowlands. The second were towns which grew up 
slowly for purposes of trade by fords of rivers or at 
ports : such are Oxeneford, Oxford ; Bedcanford, 
Bedford (a British town) ; Stretford, Stratford ; and 
Wealingaford, Wallingford. The third were the towns 
which grew up in the wastes and wealds, with names 
of varied form but more modern origin. As a whole, it 
may be said that during the entire early English period 
the names of cities were mostly Roman, the names 
of villages and country towns were mostly English. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



CHAPTER XX. 

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 

Nothing better illustrates the original peculiarities 
and subsequent development of the early English 
mind than the Anglo-Saxon literature. A vast mass 
of manuscripts has been preserved for us, embracing 
works in prose and verse of the most varied kind ; 
and all the most important of these have been made 
accessible to modern readers in printed copies. They 
cast a flood of light upon the workings of the Eng- 
lish mind in all ages, from the old pagan period in 
Sleswick to the date of the Norman Conquest, and 
the subsequent gradual supplanting of our native 
literature by a new culture based upon the Romance 
models. 

All national literature everywhere begins with rude 
songs. From the earliest period at which the Eng- 
lish and Saxon people existed as separate tribes at 
all, we may be sure that they possessed battle-songs, 
like those common to the whole Aryan stock. But 
among the Teutonic races poetry was not distinguished 
by either of the peculiarities — rime or metre — 
which mark off modern verse from prose, so far as 
its external form is concerned. Our existing English 
system of versification is not derived from our old 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 203 

native poetry at all ; it is a development of the 
Romance system, adopted by the school of Gower 
and Chaucer from the French and Italian poets. Its 
metre, or syllabic arrangement, is an adaptation from 
the Greek quantitative prosody, handed down through 
Latin and the neo-Latin dialects ; its rime is a Celtic 
peculiarity borrowed by the Romance nationalities, 
and handed on through them to modern English 
literature by the Romance school of the fourteenth 
century. Our original English versification, on the 
other hand, was neither rimed nor rhythmic. What 
answered to metre was a certain irregular swing, 
produced by a roughly recurrent number of accents 
in each couplet, without restriction as to the number 
of feet or syllables. What answered to rime was a 
regular and marked alliteration, each couplet having 
a certain key-letter, with which three principal words 
in the couplet began. In addition to these two 
poetical devices, Anglo-Saxon verse shows traces of 
parallelism, similar to that which distinguishes He- 
brew poetry. But the alliteration and parallelism do 
not run quite side by side, the second half of each 
alliterative couplet being parallel with the first half of 
the next couplet. Accordingly, each new sentence 
begins somewhat clumsily in the middle of the 
couplet. All these peculiarities are not, however, 
always to be distinguished in every separate poem. 

The following rough translation of a very early 
Teutonic spell for the cure of a sprained ankle, 
belonging to the heathen period, will illustrate the 
earliest form of this alliterative verse. The key- 



204 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



letter in each couplet is printed in capitals, and the 
verse is read from end to end, not as two separate 
columns.^ 



Balder and Woden 

There Balder's Foal 

Then Sinthgunt beguiled him, 

Then Frua beguiled him, 

Then "Woden beguiled him, 

Wrench of blood, Wrench of 

bone, 
Bone tinto Bone, 
Limb unto Limb 



Went to the Woodland : 
Fell, wrenching its Foot. 
and Sunna her Sister : 
and Folia her sister, 
as Well he knew how ; 

and eke Wrench of limb 

Blood unto Blood, 

as though Limed it were. 



In this simple spell the alliteration serves rather as 
an aid to memory than as an ornamental device. The 
following lines, translated from the ballad on ^thel- 
stan's victory at Brunanburh, in 937, will show the 
developed form of the same versificatory system. The 
parallelism and alliteration are here well marked : — • 



yEthelstan king, 
Bestower of Bracelets, 
Eadmund the ^theling, 
Won in the Slaughter, 
By Brunnanbury. 
Hewed the Helmets, 



lord 9f Earls, 

and- his Brother eke, 

honour Eternal 

with edge of the Sword 

The Bucklers they clave, 

with Hammered steel, 



' The original of this heathen charm is in the Old High 
German dialect ; but it is quoted here as a good specimen of the 
early form of alliterative verse. A similar charm undoubtedly 
existed in Anglo-Saxon, though no copy of it has come down to 
our days, as we possess a modernised and Christianised English 
version, in which the name of our Lord is substituted for that of 
Balder. 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 205 

Heirs of Edward, as was their Heritage, 

From their Fore- Fathers, ^^at oft on the Field 
They should Guard their Good 

folk Gainst every comer, 
Their Home and their Hoard. The Hated foe cringed to them. 

The Scottish Sailors, and the Northern Shipmen ; 

Fated they Fell. The Field lay gory 

With Swordsmen's blood Since the Sun rose 

On Morning tide a Mighty globe, 

To Glide o'er the Ground, God's candle bright, 

The endless Lord's taper, till the great Light 

Sank to its Setting. There Soldiers lay, 

Warriors Wounded, Northern Wights, 

Shot over Shields ; and so Scotsmen eke, 

Wearied with War. The West Saxons onwards. 

The Live-Long day in Linked order 

Followed the Footsteps of the Foul Foe. 

Of course no. songs of the old heathen period were 
committed to writing either in Sleswick or in Britain. 
The minstrels who composed them taught them by 
word of mouth to their pupils, and so handed them 
down from generati'on to generation, much as the 
Achaean rhapsodists handed down the Homeric 
poems. Nevertheless, two or three such old songs 
were afterwards written out in Christian Northum- 
bria or Wessex ; and though their heathendom has 
been greatly toned down by the transcribers, enough 
remains to give us a graphic glimpse of the fierce and 
gloomy old English nature which we could not other- 
wise obtain. One fragment, known as the Fight at 
Finnesburh (rescued from a book-cover into which it 
had been pasted), probably dates back before the 
colonisation of Britain, and closely resembles in style 



206 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

the above-quoted ode. Two other early pieces, the 
Traveller's Song and the Lament of Deor^ are inserted 
from pagan tradition in a book of later devotional 
poems preserved at Exeter. But the great epic of 
Beowulf a work composed when the English and ihe 
Danes were still living in close connexion with one 
another by the shores of the Baltic, has been handed 
down to us entire, thanks to the kind intervention of 
some Northumbrian monk, who, by Christianising 
the most flagrantly heathen portions, has saved the 
entire work from the fate which would otherwise have 
overtaken it. As a striking representation of early 
English life and thought, this great epic deserves a 
fuller description. ^ 

Beowulf is written in the same short alliterative 
metre as that of the Brunanburh ballad, and takes its 
name from its hero, a servant or companion of the 
mighty Hygelac, king of the Geatas (Jutes or Goths). 
At a distance from his home lay the kingdom of the 
Scyldings, a Danish tribe, ruled over by Hrothgar. 
There stood Heorot, the high hall of heroes, the 
greatest mead-house ever raixd. But the land of the 
Danes was haunted by a terrible fiend, known as 
Grendel, who dwelt in a dark fen in the forest belt, 
girt round with shadows and lit up at eve by flitting 
flames. Every night Grendel came forth and carried 
off some of the Danes to devour in his home. The 
description of the monster himself and of the marsh- 
land where he had his lair is full of that weird and 

• It is right to state, however, that many scholars regard 
Beowulf 2& a late translation from a Danish original. 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 207 

gloomy superstition which everywhere darkens and 
overshadows the life of the savage and the heathen 
barbarian. The terror inspired in the rude English 
mind by the mark and the woodland, the home of 
wild beasts and of hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and 
of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line. 
The fen and the forest are dim and dark ; will-o'-the- 
wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in ; 
wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens 
its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider ; the 
foeman comes through it to bring fire and slaughter to 
the clan-village at the dead of night. To these real 
terrors and dangers of the mark are added the fancied 
ones of superstition. There the terrible forms begot- 
ten of man's vague dread of the unknown — elves and 
nickors and fiends — have their murky dwelling-place. 
The atmosphere of the strange old heathen epic is 
oppressive in its gloominess. Nevertheless, its poetry 
sometimes rises to a height of great, though barbaric, 
sublimity. Beowulf himself, hearing of the evil 
wrought by Grendel set sail from his home for the 
land of the Danes. Hrothgar received him kindly, 
and entertained him and his Goths with ale and song 
in Heorot. Wealtheow, Hrothgar's queen, gold- 
decked, served them with mead. But when all had 
retired to rest on the couches of the great hall, in the 
murky night, Grendel came. He seized and slew 
one of Beowulf's companions. Then the warrior of 
the Goths followed the monster, and wounded him 
sorely with his hands. Grendel fled to his lair to die. 
But after the contest, Grendel's mother, a no less 



208. ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

hateful creature — the " Devil's dam " of our mediseval 
legends — -carries on the war against the slayer of her 
son. Beowulf descends to her home beneath the 
water, grapples with her in her cave, turns against her 
the weapons he finds there, and is again victorious. 
The Goths return to their own country laden with 
gifts by Hrothgar. After the death of Hygelac, 
Beowulf succeeds to the kingship of the Geatas, 
whom he rules well and prosperously for many years. 
At length a mysterious being, named the Fire Drake, 
a sort of dragon guarding a hidden treasure, some of 
which has been stolen while its guardian sleeps, comes 
out to slaughter his people. The old hero buckles on 
his rune-covered sword again, and goes forth to battle 
with the monster. He slays it, indeed, but is blasted 
by its fiery breath, and dies after the encounter. His 
companions light his pyre upon a lofty spit of land 
jutting out into the winter sea. Weapons and jewels 
and drinking bowls, taken from the Fire Drake's 
treasure, were thrown into the tomb for the use of the 
ghost in the other world ; and a mighty barrow was 
raised upon the spot to be a beacon far and wide to 
seafaring men. So ends the great heathen epic. It 
gives us the most valuable picture which we possess 
of the daily life led by our pagan forefathers. 

But though these poems are the oldest in tone, they 
are not the oldest in form of all that we possess. It 
is probable that the most primitive Anglo-Saxon verse 
was identical with prose, and consisted merely of 
sentences bound together by parallelism. As allite- 
ration, at first a mere memoria technica^ became an 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATQRE. 209 

ornamental adjunct, and grew more developed, the 
parallelism gradually dropped out. Gnomes or short 
proverbs of this character were in common use, and 
they closely resembled the mediaeval proverbs current 
in England to the present day. 

With the introduction of Christianity, English verse 
took a new direction. It was chiefly occupied in 
devotional and sacred poetry, or rather, such poems 
only have come down to us, as the monks transcribed 
them alone, leaving the half-heathen war-songs of the 
minstrels attached to the great houses to die out un- 
written. The first piece of EngUsh literature which 
we can actually date is a fragment of the great reli- 
gious epic of Caedmon, written about the year 670. 
Csedmon was a poor brother in Hild's monastery 
at Whitby, and he acquired the art of poetry by a 
miracle. Northumbria, in the sixth and seventh 
centuries, took the lead in Teutonic Britain ; and all 
the early literature is Northumbrian, as all the later 
hterature is West Saxon. Ccedmon's poem consisted 
in a paraphrase of the Bible history, from the Creation 
to the Ascension. The idea of a translation of the 
Bible from Latin into English would never have 
occurred to any one at that early time. English had 
as yet no literary form into which it could be thrown. 
But Caedmon conceived the notion of paraphrasing 
the Bible story in the old alliterative Teutonic verse, 
which was familiar to his hearers in songs like 
Beowulf. Some of the brethren translated or inter- 
preted for him portions of the Vulgate, and he threw 
them into rude metre. Only a single short excerpt 
p 



2IO ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

has come down to us in the original form. There is 
a later complete epic, however, also attributed to 
Csedmon, of the same scope and purport ; and it re- 
tains so much of the old heathen spirit that it may 
very possibly represent a modernised version of the 
real Csedmon's poem, by a reviser in the ninth century. 
At any rate, the latter work may be treated here under 
the name of Caedmon, by which it is universally known. 
It consists of a long Scriptural paraphrase, written in the 
alUterative metre, short, sharp, and decisive, but not 
without a wild and passionate beauty of its own. In 
tone it differs wonderfully little from Beowulf^ being 
most at home in the war of heaven and Satan, and in 
the titanic descriptions of the devils and their deeds. 
The conduct of the poem is singularly like that of 
Paradise Lost. Its wild and rapid stanzas show how 
little Christianity had yet moulded the barbaric nature 
of the newly-converted English. The epic is essentially 
a war-song ; the Hebrew element is far stronger than 
the Christian ; hell takes the place of Grendel's mere ; 
and, to borrow Mr. Green's admirable phrase, " the 
verses fall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle." 

In all these works we get the genuine native English 
note, the wild song of a pirate race, shaped in early 
minstrelsy for celebrating the deeds of gods and war- 
riors, and scarcely half-adapted afterward to the not 
wholly ahen tone of the oldest Hebrew Scriptures 
But the Latin schools, set up by the Italian monks, 
introduced into England a totally new and highly 
developed literature. The pagan Anglo-Saxons had 
not advanced beyond the stage of ballads; they had no 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 211 

history, or other prose literature of their own, except, 
perhaps, a few traditional genealogical lists, mostly 
mythical, and adapted to an artificial grouping by 
eights and forties. The Roman missionaries brought 
over the Roman works, with their developed historical 
and philosophical style ; and the change induced in 
England by copying these originals was as great as 
the change would now be from the rude Polynesian 
myths and ballads to a history of Polynesia written in 
English, and after English prototypes, by a native 
convert. In fact, the Latin language was almost as 
important to the new departure as the Latin models. 
While the old English literary form, restricted entirely 
to poetry, was unfitted for any serious narrative or 
any reflective work, the old English tongue, suited 
only to the practical needs of a rude warrior race, 
was unfitted for the expression of any but the sim- 
plest and most material ideas. It is true, the vocabu- 
lary was copious, especially in terms for natural 
objects, and it was far richer than might be expected 
even in words referring to mental states and emotions; 
but in the expression of abstract ideas, and in idioms 
suitable for philosophical discussion, it remained still, 
of course, very deficient. Hence the new serious 
literature was necessarily written entirely in the Latin 
language, which alone possessed the words and 
modes of speech fitted for its development ; but to 
exclude it on that account from the consideration of 
Anglo-Saxon literature, as many writers have done, 
would be an absurd affectation. The Latin writings 
of Englishmen are an integral part of English thought, 

P 2 



212 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

and an important factor in the evolution of English 
culture. Gradually, as English monks grew to read 
Latin from generation to generation, they invented ^ 
corresponding compounds in their own language for 
the abstract words of the southern tongue ; and 
therefore by the beginning of the eleventh century, 
the West Saxon speech of Alfred and his successors 
had grown into a comparatively wealthy dialect, 
suitable for the expression of many ideas unfamiliar 
to the rude pirates and farmers of Sleswick and East 
Anglia. Thus, in later days, a rich vernacular litera- 
ture grew up with many distinct branches. But, in 
the earher period, the use of a civilised idiom for all 
purposes connected with the higher civilisation intro- 
duced by the missionaries was absolutely necessary ; 
and so we find the codes of laws, the penitentials 
of the Church, the charters, and the prose litera- 
ture generally, almost all written at first in Latin 
alone. Gradually, as the English tongue grew fuller, 
we find it creeping into use for one after another of 
these purposes ; but to the last an educated Anglo- 
Saxon could express himself far more accurately and 
philosophically in the cultivated tongue of Rome 
than in the rough dialect of his Teutonic countrymen. 
We have only to contrast the bald and meagre style 
of the " English Chronicle," written in the mother- 
tongue, with the fulness and ease of Bseda's " Eccle- 
siastical History," written two centuries earlier in 
Latin, in order to see how great an advantage the 
rough Northumbrians of the early Christian period 
obtained in the gift of an old and polishea instru- 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 213 

ment for conveying to one another their higher 
thoughts. 

Of this new literature (which began witli the Latin 
biography of Wilfrith by ^ddi or Eddius, and the 
Latin verses of Ealdhelm) the great representative is, 
in fact, Caeda, whose Hfe has already been sufficiently 
described in an earlier chapter. Living at J arrow, a 
Benedictine monastery of the strictest type, in close 
connection with Rome, and supplied with Roman 
works in abundance, Baeda had thoroughly imbibed 
the spirit of the southern culture, and his books re- 
flect for us a true picture of the English barbarian 
toned down and almost obliterated in all distinctive 
features by receptivity for Italian civilisation. The 
Northumbrian kingdom had just passed its prime in 
his days ; and he was able to record the early history 
of the English Church and People with something 
like Roman breadth of view. His scientific know- 
ledge was up to that of his contemporaries abroad ; 
while his somewhat childish tales of miracles and 
visions, though they often betray traces of the old 
heathen spirit, were not below the average level of 
European thought in his own day. Altogether, 
Baeda may be taken as a fiiir specimen of the Ro- 
manised Englishman, alike in his strength and in his 
weakness. The samples of his historical style already 
given will suffice for illustration of his Latin works ; 
but it must not be forgotten that he was also one of the 
first writers to try his hand at regular English prose 
in his translation of St. John's Gospel. A few Eng- 
lish verses from his lips have also come down to us. 



214 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

breathing the old Teutonic spirit more deeply than 
might be expected from his other works. 

During the interval between the Northumbrian and 
West Saxon supremacies — the interval embraced by 
the eighth century, and covered by the greatness of 
Mercia under ^thelbald and Offa — we have few 
remains of English literature. The laws of Ine the 
West Saxon, and of Offa the Mercian, with the Peni- 
tentials of the Church, and the Charters, form the 
chief documents. But England gained no little credit 
for learning from the works of two Englishmen who 
had taken up their abode in the old Germanic king- 
dom : Boniface or Winfrith, the apostle of the heathen 
Teutons subjugated by the Franks, and Alcuin (Ealh- 
wine), the famous friend and secretary of Karl the 
Great. Many devotional Anglo-Saxon poems, of 
various dates, are kept for us in the two books pre- 
served at Exeter, and at VercelH in North Italy. 
Amongst them are some by Cynewulf, perhaps the 
most genuinely poetical of all the early minstrels after 
Csedmon. The following lines, taken from the be- 
ginning of his poem " The Phoenix " (a transcript 
from Lactantius), will sufficiently illustrate his style : — 

I have heard that hidden Afar from hence 

On the east of earth Is a fairest isle, 

Lovely and famous. The lap of that land 

May not be reached By many mortals, 

Dwellers on earth ; But it is divided 
Through the might of the Maker From all misdoers. 

Fair is the field, Full happy and glad, 

I'iiled with the sweetest Scented flowers. 

Unique is that island, Almighty the workei 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 



215 



Mickle of might 
There oft lieth open 
With happiest harmony, 
Winsome its woods 
Roomy with reaches. 
Nor breath of frost, 
Nor summer's heat, 
Nor fall of hail. 
Nor weltering weather, 
Falleth on any ; 
Ever in peace, 
Bloometh with blossoms. 
Standeth not steep. 
High lifteth the head, 
Nor vale, nor dale, 
Hollows or hills ; 
Aught of unsmooth ; 
Basks in the beam, 
Twelve fathoms taller 
(As quoth in their writs 
Than ever a berg 
High lifteth the head 



Who moulded that land. 
To the eyes of the blest, 
The gate of heaven. 
And its fair green wolds, 
No rain there nor snow, 
Nor fiery blast. 
Nor scattered sleet, 
Nor hoary rime. 
Nor wintry shower. 
But the field resteth 
And the princely land 
Berg there nor mount 
Nor stony crag 
As here with us, 
Nor deep-caverned dov/n, 
Nor hangeth aloft 
But ever the plain, 
Joyfully blooming. 
Towereth that land 
Many wise men) 
That bright among mortals 
Among heaven's stars. 



Two noteworthy points may be marked in this 
extract. Its feeling for natural scenery is quite 
different from the wild sublimity of the descriptions 
of nature in Beowulf. Cynewulf s verse is essentially 
the verse of an agriculturist ; it looks with disfavour 
upon mountains and rugged scenes, while its ideal is 
one of peaceful tillage. The monk speaks out in it 
as cultivator and dreamer. Its tone is wholly differ- 
ent from that of the Brunanburh ballad or the other 
fierce war-songs. Moreover, it contains one or two 
rimes, preserved in this translation, whose full sig- 
nificance will be pointed out hereafter. 



2l6 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

The anarchy of Northumbria, and still more the 
Danish inroads, put an end to the literary movement 
in the North and the Midlands ; but the struggle 
in Wessex gave new life to the West Saxon people. 
Under Alfred, Winchester became the centre of Eng- 
lish thought. But the West Saxon literature is almost 
entirely written in English, not in Latin ; a fact which 
marks the progressive development of vocabulary and 
idiom in the native tongue. Alfred himself did 
much to encourage literature, inviting over learned 
men from the continent,, and founding schools for 
the West Saxon youth in his dwarfed dominions. 
Most of the Winchester works are attributed to his 
own pen, though doubtless he was largely aided by 
his advisers, and amongst others by Asser, his Welsh 
secretary and Bishop of Sherborne. They comprise 
translations into the Anglo-Saxon of Boethius de Con- 
solatione, the Universal History of Orosius, Bseda's 
Ecclesiastical History, and Pope Gregory's Regula 
Pastoralis. But the fact that Alfred still has re- 
course to Roman originals, marks the stage of 
civilisation as yet mainly imitative ; while the inter- 
esting passages intercalated by the king himself 
show that the beginnings of a really native prose 
literature were already taking shape in English hands. 

The chief monument of this truly Anglo-Saxon 
literature, begun and completed by English writers in 
the English tongue alone, is the Chronicle. That 
invaluable document, the oldest history of any Teu- 
tonic race in its own language, was probably first 
compiled at the court of Alfred. Its earlier part 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 21 7 

consists of mere royal genealogies of the first West 
Saxon kings, together with a few traditions of the 
colonisation, and some excerpts from Bseda. But 
with the reign of ^thelwulf, Alfred's father, it be- 
comes comparatively copious, though its records still 
remain dry and matter-of-fact, a bare statement of 
facts, without comment or emotional display. The 
following extract, giving the account of -Alfred's 
death, will show its meagre nature. The passage has 
been modernised as little as is consistent with its 
intelligibility at the present day : — 

An. 901. Here died Alfred ^thulfing [^thelwulfing— the 
son of ^thelwulf], six nights ere All Hallow Mass. He was 
king over all English-kin, bar that deal that was under Danish 
weald [dominion] ; and he held that kingdom three half-years 
ess than thirty winters. There came Eadward his son to the rule. 
And there seized ^thelwold aetheling, his father's brother's 
son, the ham [villa] at Winburne [Wimbourne], and at 
Tweoxneam [Christchurch], by the king's unthank and his 
witan's [without leave from the king]. There rode the king 
with his fyrd till he reached Badbury against Winburne. And 
iEthelwold sat within the ham, with the men that to him had 
bowed, and he had forwrought [obstructed] all the gates in, and 
said that he would either there live or there lie. Thereupon 
rode the aetheling on night away, and sought the [Danish] host 
in Northumbria, and they took him for king and bowed to him. 
And the king bade ride after him, but they could not outride 
him. Then beset man the woman that he had erst taken without 
the king's leave, and against the bishop's word, for that she was 
ere that hallowed a nun. And on this ilk year forth-fared 
iEthelred (he was ealdorman on Devon) four weeks ere Alfred 
king. 

During the Augustan age the Chronicle grows less 



2l8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

full, but contains several fine war-songs, of the genu- 
ine old English type, full of savagery in sentiment, 
and abrupt or broken in manner, but marked by the 
same wild poetry and harsh inversions as the older 
heathen ballads. Amongst them stand the lines on 
the fight of Brunanburh, whose exordium is quoted 
above. Its close forms one of the finest passages in 
old English verse : — 

Behind them they Left, the Lych to devour, 

The Sallow kite and the Swart raven, 

Horny of beak, — and Him, the dusk-coated, 

The white-afted Erne, the corse to Enjoy, 

The Greedy war-hawk, and that Grey beast, 

The Wolf of the Wood. No such Woeful slaughter 

Aye on this Island Ever hath been, 

By edge of the Sword, as book Say eth. 

Writers of Eld, since of Eastward hither 

English and Saxons Sailed over Sea, 

O'er the Broad Brine, — landed in Britain, 

Proud Workers of War, and o'ercame the Welsh, 

Earls Eager of fame. Obtaining this Earth. 

During the decadence, in the disastrous reign of 
^thelred, the Chronicle regains its fulness, and the 
following passage may be taken as a good specimen of 
its later style. It shows the approach to comment and 
reflection, as the compilers grew more accustomed to 
historical writing in. their own tongue : — 

An. 1009. Here on this year were the ships ready of which 
we ere spake, and there were so many of them as never ere (so 
far as books tell us) were made among English kin in no king's 
day. And man brought them all together to Sandwich, and 
there should they lie, and hold this earth against all outlanders 
[foreigners'] hosts. But we had not yet the luck nor the worship 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 2x9 

[valour] that the ship-fyrd should be of any good to this land, 
no more than it oft was afore. Then befel it at this ilk time or 
a little ere, that Brihtric, Eadric's brother the ealdorman's, 
forwrayed [accused] Wulfnoth child to the king : and he went 
out and drew unto him twenty ships, and there harried every- 
where by the south shore, and wrought all evil. Then quoth 
man to the ship-fyrd that man might easily take them, if man 
were about it. Then took Brihtric to himself eighty ships and 
thought that he should work himself great fame if he should get 
Wulfnoth, quick or dead. But as they were thitherward, there 
came such a wind against them such as no man ere minded 
[remembered], and it all to-beat and to-brake the ships, and 
warped them on land : and soon came Wulfnoth and for-burned 
the ships. When this was couth [known] to the other ships 
where the king was, how the others fared, then was it as though 
it were all redeless, and the king fared him home, and the 
ealdormen, and the high witan, and forlet the ships thus lightly. 
And the folk that were on the ships brought them round eft to 
Lunden, and let all the people's toil thus lightly go for nought : 
and the victory that all English kin hoped for was no better. 
There this ship-fyrd was thus ended ; then came, soon after 
Lammas, the huge foreign host, that we hight Thurkill's host, 
to Sandwich, and soon wended their way to Canterbury, and 
would quickly have won the burg if they had not rather yearned 
for peace of them. And all the East Kentings made peace with 
the host, and gave it three thousand pound. And the host 
there, soon after that, wended till it came to Wightland, and there 
everywhere in Suth-Sex, and on Hamtunshire, and eke on 
Berkshire harried and burnt, as their wont is. Then bade the 
king call out all the people, that men should hold against them 
on every half [side] : but none the less, look ! they fared where 
they willed. Then one time had the king foregone before them 
with all the fyrd as they were going to their ships, and all the 
folk was ready to fight them. But it was let, thi-ough Eadric 
ealdorman, as it ever yet was. Then, after St. Martin's mass, 
they fared eft again into Kent, and took them a winter seat on 
Thames, and victualled themselves from East-Sex and from the 



2 20 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



shires that there next were, on the twain halves of Thames. 
And oft they fought against the burg of Lunden, but praise be 
to God, it yet stands sound, and they ever there fared evilly. 
And there after mid-winter they took their way up, out through 
Chiltem, and so to Oxenaford [Oxford], and for-burnt the burg, 
and took their way on to the twa halves of Thames to shLpward. 
There man warned them that there was fyrd gathered at Lunden 
against them ; then wended they over at Stane [Staines]. And 
thus fared they all the winter, and that Lent were in Kent and 
bettered [repaired] their ships. 

We possess several manuscript versions of the 
Chronicle, belonging to different abbeys, and con- 
taining in places somewhat different accounts. Thus 
the Peterborough copy is fullest on matters affecting 
that monastery, and even inserts several spurious 
grants, which, however, are of value as showing how 
incapable the writers were of scientific forgery, and 
so as guarantees of the general accuracy of the docu- 
ment. But in the main facts they all agree. Nor do 
they stop short at the Norman Conquest. Most of 
them continue half through the reign of William, and 
then cease ; while one manuscript goes on uninter- 
ruptedly till the reign of Stephen, and breaks off 
abruptly in the year 1154 with an unfinished sentence. 
With it, native prose literature dies down altogether 
until the reign of Edward III. 

As a whole, however, the Conquest struck the 
death-blow of Anglo-Saxon literature almost at once. 
During the reigns of Alfred's descendants Wessex 
had produced a rich crop of native works on all sub- 
jects, but especially religious. In this literature the 
greatest name was that of ^Ifric, whose Homilies are 



1 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 221 

models of the classical West Saxon prose. But after 
the Conquest our native literature died out wholly, 
' and a ne^v literature, founded on Romance models, 
took its place. The Anglo-Saxon style lingered on 
among the people, but it was gradually killed down 
by the Romance style of the court writers. In prose, 
the history of William of Malmesbury, written in 
Latin, and in a wider continental spirit, marks the 
change. In poetry, the English school struggled on 
longer, but at last succumbed. A few words on the 
nature of this process will not be thrown away. 

The old Teutonic poetry, with its treble system of 
accent, alliteration, and parallelism, was wholly differ- 
ent from the Romance poetry, with its double system 
of rime and metre. But, from an early date, the 
English themselves were fond of verbal jingles, such 
as *' Scot and lot," " sac and soc," "frith and grith," 
" eorl and ceorl," or " might and right." Even in the 
alliterative poems we find many occasional rimes, 
such as "hlynede and dynede," "wide and side," 
" Dryht-guman sine drencte mid wine," or such as 
the rimes already quoted from Cynewulf. As time 
went on, and intercourse with other countries became 
greater, the tendency to rime settled down into a 
fixed habit. Rimed Latin verse was already familiar 
to the clergy, and was imitated in their works. Much 
of the very ornate Anglo-Saxon prose of the latest 
period is full of strange verbal tricks, as shown in the 
following modernised extract from a sermon of Wulf- 
stan. Here, the alliterative letters are printed in 
capitals, and the rimes in italics : — 



22 2 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

No Wonder is it that Woes befall us, for Well We Wot that 
now full many a year men little care what thing they dare in 
word or deed; and Sorely hns this nation Sinned, whate'er man 
Say, with Manifold Sins and with right Manifold Misdeeds, with 
Slayings and with Slaughters, with robbing and with stabbing, 
with Grasping deed and hungry Greed, through Christian 
Treason and through heathen Treachery, through guile and 
through wile, through lawlessness and awelessness, through 
Murder of Friends and Murder of Foes, through broken Troth 
and broken Truth, through wedded unchastity and cloistered 
impurity. Little \h&y trow of marriage vow, as ere this I said : 
little they reck the breach of oath or troth ; swearing and for- 
swearing, on every side, far and wide, Fast and Feast they hold 
not, Peace and Pact they keep not, oft and anon. Thus in this 
land they stand, Foes to Christendom, Friends to heathendom, 
Persecutors of Priests, Persecutors of People, all too many ; 
spurners of godly law and Christian bond, who Loudly Laugh at 
the Teaching of God's Teachers and the Preaching of God's 
Preachers, and whatso rightly to God's rites belongs. 

The nation was thus clearly preparing itself from 
within for the adoption of the Romance system. 
Immediately after the Conquest, rimes begin to 
appear distinctly, while alliteration begins to die out. 
An Anglo-Saxon poem on the character of William 
the Conqueror, inserted in the Chronicle under the 
vear of his death, consists of very rude rimes which 
may be modernised as follows — 

Gold he took by might, 

And of great unright. 

From his folk with evil deed 

For sore little need. 

He was on greediness befallen, 

And getsomeness he loved withal. 

He set a mickle deer frith, 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 223 

And he laid laws therewith, 

Tliat whoso slew hart or hind 

Him should man then blinden. 

He forbade to slay the harts, 

And so eke the boars. 

So well he loved the high deer 

As if he their father were. 

Eke he set by the hares 

That they might freely fare. 

His rich men mourned it 

And the poor men wailed it. 

But he was so firmly wrought 

That he recked of all nought. 

And they must all withal 

The king's will follow, 

If they wished to live 

Or their land have, 

Or their goods eke, 

Or his peace to seek. 

Woe is me. 

That any man so proud should be, 

Thus himself up to raise, 

And over all men to boast. 

May God Almighty show his soul mild-heart-ness, 

And do him for his sins forgiveness ! 

From that time English poetry bifurcates. On the 
one hand, we have the survival of the old Teutonic 
alliterative swing in Layamon's Brut and in Piers 
Plowman — the native verse of the people sung by 
native minstrels : and on the other hand we have the 
new Romance rimed metre in Robert of Gloucester, 
'William of Palerne," Gower, and Chaucer. But 
from Piers Plowman and Chaucer onward the 
Romance system conquers and the Teutonic system 



2 24 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

dies rapidly. Our modern poetry is wholly Romance 
in descent, form, and spirit. 

Thus in literature as in civilisation generally, the 
culture of old Rome, either as handed down eccle- 
siastically through the Latin, or as handed down 
popularly through the Norman-French, overcame, the 
native Anglo-Saxon culture, such as it was, and drove 
it utterly out of the England which we now know. 
Though a new literature, in Latin and English, sprang 
up after the Conquest, that Uterature had its roots, 
not in Sleswick or in Wessex, but in Greece, in Rome, 
in Provence, and in Normandy. With the Normans, 
a new era began — an era when Romance civilisation 
was grafted by harsh but strong hands on to the 
Anglo-Saxon stock, the Anglo-Saxon institutions, and 
the Anglo-Saxon tongue. With the first step in this 
revolution, our present volume has completed its 
assigned task. The story of the Normans will be told 
by another pen in the same series. 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 225 



CHAPTER XXI. 

ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCES IN MODERN BRITAIN. 

Perhaps the best way of summing up the results ot 
the present inquiry will be by considering briefly the 
main elements of our existing life and our actual 
empire which we owe to the Anglo-Saxon nationality. 
We may most easily glance at them under the five 
separate heads of blood, character, language, civilisa- 
tion, and institutions. 

In bloody it is probable that the importance of the 
Anglo-Saxon element has been generally over- 
estimated. It has been too usual to speak of England 
as though it were synonymous with Britain, and to 
overlook the numerical strength of the Celtic popula- 
tion in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. It 
has been too usual, also, to neglect the considerable 
Danish, Norwegian, and Norman element, which, 
though belonging to the same Low German and 
Scandinavian stock, yet differs in some important 
particulars from the Anglo-Saxon. But we have seen 
reason to conclude that even in the most purely 
Teutonic region of Britain, the district between Forth 
and Southampton Water, a considerable proportion of 
the people were of Celtic or pre-Celtic descent, from 
the very first age of English settlement. This conclu- 
Q 



226 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

sion is borne out both by the physical traits of the 
peasantry and the nature of the early remains. In the 
western half of South Britain, from Clyde to Cornwall, 
the proportion of Anglo-Saxon blood has probably 
always been far smaller. The Norman conquerors 
themselves were of mixed Scandinavian, Gaulish, 
and Breton descent. Throughout the middle ages, 
the more Teutonic half of Britain — the southern 
and eastern tract — was, undoubtedly the most import- 
ant : and the English, mixed with Scandinavians 
from Denmark or Normandy, formed the ruling 
caste. Up to the days of Elizabeth, Teutonic Britain 
led the van in civilisation, population, and commerce. 
But since the age of the Tudors, it seems probable, 
as Dr. Rolleston and others have shown, that the 
Celtic element has largely reasserted itself. A 
return wave of Celts has inundated the Teutonic 
region. Scottish Highlanders have poured into 
Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London : Welshmen have 
poured into Liverpool, Manchester, and all the great 
towns of England : Irishmen have poured into every 
part of the British dominions. During the middle 
ages, the Teutonic portion of Britain was by far the 
most densely populated ; but at the present day, the 
almost complete restriction of coal to the Celtic or 
semi-Celtic area has aggregated the greatest masses of 
population in the west and north. If we take into 
consideration the probable large substratum of Celts 
or earlier races in the Teutonic counties, the wide 
area of the undoubted Celtic region which pours 
forth a constant stream of emigrants towards the 



ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCES IN MODERN BRITAIN. 227 

Teutonic tract, the change of importance between 
south-east and north-west, since the industrial develop- 
ment of the coal country, and the more rapid rate of 
increase among the Celts, it becomes highly probable 
that not one-half the population of the British Isles 
is really of Teutonic descent. Moreover, it must be 
remembered that, whatever may have been the case 
in the primitive Anglo-Saxon period, intermarriages 
between Celts and Teutons have been common for at 
least four centuries past; and that therefore almost 
all Englishmen at the present day possess at least a 
fraction of Celtic blood. 

'' The people," says Professor Huxley, " are vastly 
less Teutonic than their language." It is not likely 
that any absolutely pure-blooded Anglo-Saxons now 
exist in our midst at all, except perhaps among the 
farmer class in the most Teutonic and agricultural 
shires : and even this exception is extremely doubt- 
ful. Persons bearing the most obviously Celtic 
names — Welsh, Cornish, Irish, or Highland Scots 
— are to be found in all our large towns, and 
scattered up and down through the country districts. 
Hence we may conclude with great probability 
that the Anglo-Saxon blood has long since been 
everywhere diluted by a strong Celtic intermix- 
ture. Even in the earliest times and in the most 
Teutonic counties, many serfs of non-Teutonic race 
existed from the very beginning : their masters have 
ere now mixed with other non-Teutonic families else- 
where, till even the restricted English people at the 
present day can hardly claim to be much more than 



2 28 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

half Anglo-Saxon. Nor do the Teutons now even 
retain their position as a ruling caste. Mixed Celts 
in England itself have long since risen to many high 
places. Leading families of Welsh, Cornish, Scotch, 
and Irish blood have also been admitted into the 
peerage of the United Kingdom, and form a large 
proportion of the House of Commons, of the official 
world, and of the governing class in India, the 
Colonies, and the empire generally. These families 
have again intermarried with the nobility and gentry 
of English, Danish, or Norman extraction, and thus 
have added their part to the intricate intermixture of 
the two races. At the present day, we can only speak 
of the British people as Anglo-Saxons in a conven- 
tional sense : so far as blood goes, we need hardly 
hesitate to set them down as a pretty equal admixture 
of Teutonic and Celtic elements. 

In character^ the Anglo-Saxons have bequeathed 
to us much of the German solidity, industry, and 
patience, traits which have been largely amalgamated 
with the intellectual quickness and emotional nature 
of the Celt, and have thus produced the prevailing 
English temperament as we actually know it. To the 
Anglo-Saxon blood we may doubtless attribute our 
general sobriety, steadiness, and persistence ; our 
scientific patience and thoroughness ; our political 
moderation and endurance ; our marked love of 
individual freedom and impatience of arbitrary 
restraint. The Anglo-Saxon was slow to learn, but 
retentive of what he learnt. On the other hand, he 
was unimaginative ; and this want of imagination 



ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCES IN MODERN BRITAIN. 229 

may be traced in the more Teutonic counties to the 
present day. But when these qualities have been 
counteracted by the Celtic wealth of fancy, the race 
has produced the great English literature,~a litera- 
ture whose form is wholly Roman, while in matter, 
its more solid parts doubtless owe much to the 
Teuton, and its lighter portions, especially its poetry 
and romance, can be definitely traced in great measure 
to known Celtic elements. While the Teutonic blood 
differentiates our somewhat slow and steady character 
from the more logical but volatile and unstable Gaul, 
the Celtic blood differentiates it from the far slower, 
heavier, and less quick or less imaginative Teutons of 
Germany and Scandinavia. 

In language we owe almost everything to the Anglo- 
Saxons. Tlie Low German dialect which they brought 
with them from Sleswick and Hanover still remains 
in all essentials the identical speech employed by 
ourselves at the present day. It received a few 
grammatical forms from the cognate Scandinavian 
dialects ; it borrowed a few score or so of words from 
the Welsh ; it adopted a small Latin vocabulary of 
ecclesiastical terms from the early missionaries; it 
took in a considerable number of Romance elements 
after the Norman Conquest ; it enriched itself with 
an immense variety of learned compounds from the 
Greek and Latin at the Renaissance period : but all 
these additions affected almost exclusively its stock of 
words, and. did not in the least interfere with its struc- 
ture or its place in the scientific classification of 
languages. The English which we now speak is not 



230 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

in any sense a Romance tongue. It is the lineal 
descendant of the English of Alfred and of Baeda, 
enlarged in its vocabulary by many words which they 
did not use, impoverished by the loss of a few which 
they employed, yet still essentially identical in 
grammar and idiom with the language of the first 
Teutonic settlers. Gradually losing its inflexions from 
the days of Eadgar onward, it assumed its existing 
type before the thirteenth century, and continuously 
incorporated an immense number of French and Latin 
words, which greatly increased its value as an instru- 
ment of thought. But it is important to recollect that 
the English tongue has nothing at all to do in its origin 
with either Welsh or French. The Teutonic speech 
of the Anglo-Saxon settlers drove out the old Celtic 
speech throughout almost all England and the Scotch 
Lowlands before the end of the eleventh century , 
it drove out the Cornish in the eighteenth century , 
and it is now driving out the Welsh, the Erse, and 
the Gaelic, under our very eyes. In language at 
least the British empire (save of course India) is 
now almost entirely English, or in other words, 
Anglo-Saxon. 

In civilisation^ on the other hand, we owe compar- 
atively little to the direct Teutonic influence. The 
native Anglo-Saxon culture was low, and even before 
its transplantation to Britain it had undergone some 
modification by mediate mercantile transactions with 
Rome and the Mediterranean states. The alphabet, 
coins, and even a few southern words, (such as ''alms") 
had already filtered through to the shores of the Baltic, 



ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCES IN MODERN BRITAIN. 23 1 

After the colonisation of Britain, the An glo-Saxons 
learnt something of the higher agriculture from their 
Romanised serfs, and adopted, as early as the heathen 
period, some small portion of the Roman system, so 
far as regarded roads, fortifications, and, perhaps, 
buildings. The Roman towns still stood in their 
midst, and a fragrant, at least, of the Romanised 
population still carried on commerce with the half- 
Roman Frankish kingdom across the Channel. The 
re-introduction of Christianity was at the same time 
the re-introduction of Roman culture in its later form. 
The Latin language and the Mediterranean arts once 
more took their place in Britain, The Romanising 
prelates, — Wilfrith, Theodore, Dunstan, — were also 
the leaders of civilisation in their own times. The 
Norman Conquest brought England into yet closer 
connection with the Continent ; and Roman law and 
Roman arts still more deeply affected our native cul- 
ture. Norman artificers supplanted the rude English 
handicraftsmen in many cases, and became a domi- 
nant class in towns. The old English literature, and 
especially the old English poetry, died utterly out 
with Piers Plowman ; while a new literature, based 
upon Romance models, took its origin with Chaucer 
and the other Court poets. Celtic-Latin rhyme ousted 
the genuine Teutonic alliteration. With the Renais- 
sance, the triumph of the southern culture was com- 
plete. Greek philosophy and Greek science foimed 
the starting-point for our modern developments. The 
ecclesiastical revolt from papal Rome was accom- 
panied by a literary and artistic return to the models 



232 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

of pagan Rome. The Renaissance was, in fact, the 
throwing off of all that was Teutonic and mediaeval, 
the resumption of progressive thought and scientific 
knowledge, at the point where it had been interrupted 
by the Germanic inroads of the fifth century. The 
unjaded vigour of the German races, indeed, counted 
for much ; and Europe took up the lost thread of the 
dying empire with a youthful freshness very different 
from the effete listlessness of the Mediterranean 
culture in its last stage. Yet it is none the less true 
that our whole civilisation is even now the carrying 
out and completion of the Greek and Roman culture 
in new fields and with fresh intellects. We owe Httle 
here to the Anglo-Saxon ; we owe everything to the 
great stream of western culture, which began in Egypt 
and Assyria, permeated Greece and the Archipelago, 
spread to Italy and the Roman empire, and, finally, 
now embraces the whole European and American 
world. The Teutonic intellect and the Teutonic 
character have largely modified the spirit of the 
Mediterranean civilisation ; but the tools, the instru- 
ments, the processes themselves, are all legacies from 
a different race. Englishmen did not invent letters, 
money, metallurgy, glass, architecture, and science; 
they received them all ready-made, from Italy and 
the ^gean, or more remotely still from the Euphrates 
and the Nile. Nor is it necessary to add that in 
religion we have no debt to the Anglo-Saxon, our 
existing creed being entirely derived through Rome 
from the Semitic race. 

In institutions^ once more, the Anglo-Saxon has 



ANGLO-SAXON INFLUENCES IN MODERN BRITAIN. 233 

contributed almost everything. Our political govern- 
ment, our limited monarchy, our parliament, our 
shires, our hundreds, our townships, are considered 
by the dominant school of historians to be all 
Anglo-Saxon in origin. Our jury is derived from 
an Anglo-Saxon custom ; our nobility and officials 
are representatives of Anglo-Saxon earls and reeves. 
The Teuton, Vv'hen he settled in Britain, brought 
with him the Teutonic organisation in its entirety. 
He established it throughout the whole territory 
which he occupied or conquered. As the West 
Saxon over-lordship grew to be the English kingdom, 
and as the English kingdom gradually annexed or 
coalesced with the Welsh and Cornish principalities, 
the Scotch and Irish kingdoms, — the Teutonic system 
spread over the whole of Britain. It underwent some 
little modification at the hands of the Normans, and 
more still at those of the A ngevins ; but, on the whole, 
it is still a wide yet natural development of the old 
Germanic constitution. 

Thus, to sum up in a single sentence, the Anglo- 
Saxons have contributed about one-half the blood of 
Britain, or rather less ; but they have contributed the 
whole framework of the language, and the whole 
social and political organisation ; while, on the other 
hand, they have contributed hardly any of the civil- 
isation, and none of the religion. We are now a 
mixed race, almost equally Celtic and Teutonic by 
descent ; we speak a pu rely Teutonic language, with 
a large admixture of Latin roots in its vocabulary ; we 
live under Teutonic institutions ; we enjoy the fruits 



234 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 

of a Graeco-Roman civilisation ; and we possess a 
Christian Church, handed down to us directly through 
Roman sources from a Hebrew original. To the 
extent so indicated, and to that extent only, we may 
still be justly styled an Anglo-Saxon people. 



INDEX 



^LFHEAH cf Canterbury, i68 
JEUred the West Saxon, 136; 
his life, 139 ; his death, 140 ; 
his writings, 216 
^^Ue of Sussex, 24, 30 
yEsc the Jute, 29 
/Ethelbald of Mercia, 1 1 7 
^thelberht of Kent, 85 
iEthelberht of Wessex, 129 
yEthelfiaed of Mercia, 142 
^thelfnth of Northumbria, 53, 

62 
yEthehed of Wessex, 130 
^thelred the Unready, 164 
iEthelstan of Wessex, 144 
i^thelwulf of Wessex, 124 
Aidan of Lindisfarne, 95 
Akerman, Mr., on survival of 

Celts, 59 
Anderida, 30, 41 
Anglo-Saxons, 8; their religion, 

16 ; language, 174 
Architecture, 155 
Aryans, I 

Augustine, St., of Canterbury, 
arrives in England, 85 ; col- 
loquy with Welsh bishops, 93 

Bi^DA, 61 ; his life, 109 ; his 
writings, 213, and passim 

Bamborough built, 34 ; princes 
of, 134, 144 

Bayeux, Saxon settlement at, 22 

Benedict Biscop, 109 

Beowulf, 185, 206, QXid passim 



Bercta, queen of Kentmen, 85 
Bernicia settled, 34 ; coalesce? 

with D(ira, 35 
Boulogne, Saxon settlement at, 

22 
Brunanburh, battle of, 14$ 

ballad on, 204, 218 
Burhred of Mercia, 131 

Cad WALLA, 92, 94 

Casdmon the poet, 103 ; hu 

epic, 209 
Cerdic the Briton, 31, 67 
Cerdic the West Saxon, 24, 31 
Chester, battle of, 58 
Chronicle, English, 63 ; its 

origin and nature, 216 • 

quoted, passim 
Clans, 8, 43 ; m.eanings of theii 

names, 80 ; occurrence in 

different shires, 8 1 
Cnut, i6q 
Coiti the Driest, 89 
Count of the Saxon Shore, 22 
Cuthberht of Lindisfarne, 97 
Cuthwine of Wessex, 51 
Cuthwulf of Wessex, 50 
Cynewulf the poet, 214 
Cynewulf of Wessex, 119 

Danish invasions, 123 et seq. 
Dawkins, Prof. Boyd, 2 
Deira settled, 34 
Deorham, battle of, 51 
Dunstan, 147 



236 



ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN. 



Eadgar of Wessex, 147 
Eadmund of East Anglia, 130 
Eadward (the Elder), 14 1 
Eadward (the Confessor), 170 
Eadwine of Northumbria, 63 ; 

converted, 88 
East Anglia colonised, 36 ; 

conquered by Danes, 130 
Ecgbert of Wessex, 120 
El met, 35 ; conquered by Eng 

li&h, 67 
English (or Anglians), 5 ; their 

language, see Anglo-Saxons 
English Chronicle, see Chro- 
nicle, English 
Essex colonised, 36 

Felix converts East Anglia, 96 
Freeman, Dr. E. A., 57, 64, 

65, 69, and J>assim 
Frisians, 5 ; as slave merchants, 

75 ; ships, 123 ; employed by 

Alfred, 139 

Germanic race, 4 
Gewissas, 37 

Gildas, 28, 47 ; his book, 60 
Gregory the Great sends mis- 
sion to England, 85 
Grimm's Law, 175 
Guthrum the Dane, 137 
Gyrwas, 49 
HiESTEN the pirate, 138, 141 

Harold, 170 
Hastings, battle of, 171 
Heathendom, 16, 71 
Hengest, 28 
Horsa, 28 

Huxley, Prof., on English Eth- 
nography, 5 
Hyring, king of Bernicia, 33 

Ida of Northumbria, 25, 32 ; 
his pedigree, 46 



lona, 93 

Jutes, 5; settle in Kent, 23, 
28 ; in the Isle of Wight, 
24, 37 ; in Northumbria, 32 

Kemble, on British in towns, 
65 ; on Celtic personal names 
in England, 66 

Kent, settled by Jutes, 23, 28 ; 
converted, 85 

Lincolnshire colonised, 35 ; 
converted, 91 

Lindisfarne, 95 

Loidis, 35 

London, 37, 158 

Lothian, originally English, 35; 
unconquered by Danes, 135 ; 
granted to king of Scots, 149 

Low Germans, 5 ; their lan- 
guage, 176 

Marriage in heathen times, 
74, Si 

Meonwaras, 37 

Mercia colonised, 49 ; its rise 
under Penda, 92 ; its supre- 
macy, 117; conquered by 
Wessex, 122 ; by the Danes, 

131 

Monasteries, 102 

Nennius, 32, 67 

Nithaid, 9 

Northumbria settled, 32 ; con- 
verted, 88 ; conquered by 
Danes, 130 

Notitia Imperii, 22 

Offa of Mercia, 117 ; his dyke, 

118 
Oswald of Northumbria, 94 
Oswiu of Northumbria, 95 



INDEX. 



237 



Palgrave, Sir F., 66 
Paulinus, 88 
Penda of Mercia, 91, 94 
Phillips, Prof., on Celtic blood 

in Yorkshire, 57 
Port, mythical hero, 31 

ROLLESTON, Prof., on Anglo- 
Saxon barrows, 25 ; on sur- 
vival of Celts, 59 

Ruim, old name of Thanet, 

23 
Runes, 97 

Salisbury conquered by Eng- 
lish, 50 

Saxons, 5 ; English, so called 
by Celtic races, 21 ; settle in 
Sussex, 24 J in Essex, 36 ; 
in Wessex, 37 

Saxons, Old, 7 ; their consti- 
tution, 9 

Ships of bronze age, 19 ; of iron 
age, 20 ; king ^Elfred's, 
139 



Stubbs, Rev. Canon, 120, and 

passim 
Sussex settled, 24, 29 
Swegen, 165 

Taylor, Rev. Isaac, on Hun- 
dreds, 68 
Teutonic race, 4 
Thanet, 23 

Theodore of Canterbury, 107 
Thunor, 16; his worship, 77 
Towns, 157 
Totemism, 79 

VORTIGERN, '28 

Wessex settled, 24, 31 
Whitby, synod of, 97 ; abbey 

at, 103 
Wight, settled by Jutes, 23 
Wihtgar, 31 

Wilfrith of York, 97, 105, 108 
Winchester, 37, 158 
Winwidfield, 96 
Woden, 16, 46 ; his worship, 76 



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